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JOHN RUSKIN 
After the painting made in 1849, by Sir John Millais, R. A. 



ECLECTIC ENGLISH CLASSICS 

RUSKIN'S 

SESAME AND LILIES 



THREE LECTURES 

1. OF KINGS' TREASURIES 

2. OF QUEENS' GARDENS 

3. THE MYSTERY OF LIFE 



EDITED BY 

C. R. ROUNDS 

HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH 
STATE NORMAL SCHOOL 
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN 



AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI CHICAGO 



.^"^X 



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Copyright, 1916, by 
American Book Company 



ruskin's sesame and lilies 
w. p. I 



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APR 20 1916 

©C1,A4277G6 



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CONTENTS 

T PAGE 

Introduction ^ 

Chronological Summary 19 

Bibliography 20 

Author's Preface to the Edition of 1871 21 

Lecture I — Sesame. Of Kings' Treasuries 33 

Lecture II— Lilies. Of Queens' Gardens 81 

Lecture III — The Mystery of Life and Its Arts 114 

Notes 149 



INTRODUCTION 

JOHN RUSKIN 

Few tasks are more difficult than to present an account of 
John Ruskin that is at once fair and brief. It is difficult to be 
fair to him, because his life, while one of steadfast integrity 
of purpose, chastity of conduct, clear, high endeavor, and un- 
selfish love for humanity, was narrowed by many limitations, 
— almost weaknesses. They were not of the surface but were 
grained in his nature; they led him into inevitable inconsist- 
encies and anomalous situations, and brought down upon 
him ridicule and abuse, which, though utterly without justifi- 
cation, were not without cause. 

Yet these same weaknesses were necessary to the carrying 
out of his life work! That is the tragedy of it. It is the thing 
that is hardest to explain; it is particularly hard to explain 
briefly. To understand it one must know something of the 
years of labor, the tragedies of love, the illnesses and the 
griefs that left their marks upon this man's highly sensitized 
soul. 

John Ruskin was born in London, on the 8th of February, 
1 8 19. He had no childhood, as we know the term, and almost 
no young manhood. He was an only child, with a busy mer- 
chant for a father, and for a mother a Spartan woman of 
Scotch ancestry, whose rigorous discipline over her son never 
relaxed to the day of her death, — when the "boy" was over 
sixty. 

The story of his almost toyless infancy, which he tells so 
freely and charmingly in Prceteriia, has often been related. 
For some time his only plaything was a bunch of keys. Later 
he was given a ball, a cart, and a box of wooden bricks. He 
spent much time studying the patterns in the carpet and the 
lines of brick in the neighboring houses, and in watching the 
filling of a water cart near by. An aunt, pitying his "monastic 
poverty," gave him a Punch and Judy. "My mother was 

5 



6 INTRODUCTION 

obliged to accept them," he says, "but afterwards quietly- 
told me it was not right that I should have them; and I never 
saw them again." His diet was quite as strictly censored. 
"I was permitted to crack other people's nuts for them * * * 
but never to have any myself. * * * I recollect my mother 
giving me three raisins. * * * My father * * * did not finish 
his custard; and my mother brought me the bottom of 
it into the back room." Perhaps the most significant thing 
is the man's attitude towards this boyhood, as he looks back 
upon it from old age: ''With these modest, but, I still think, 
entirely sufficient possessions, and being always summarily 
whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the 
stairs, I soon attained serene and secure methods of life and 
motion. * * *" 

Yes, too serene and too secure. For John Ruskin, sheltered 
in his home life, forbidden to swim for fear he "would drown,'* 
to play ball for fear he "would get hurt," to box because "it 
was vulgar," came to his teens, as he says, a "conceited little 
monkey," too sure of himself, with none of the saving wisdom 
and modesty that experience brings to most boys. 

Every summer Mr. Ruskin set off, accompanied by his wife 
and son, on long carriage tours through England or Scotland. 
Although business was primarily the object of these journeys, 
the Ruskins made a point of visiting each year some pictur- 
esque or historical section of the country. The boy always 
made records of the places he saw, both by written accounts 
and by drawings. During this period he acquired his love for 
nature, and cultivated accurateness of observation. On his 
thirteenth birthday he was given a book, Rogers's Italy, il- 
lustrated by Turner, and he speaks of this later as one of the 
incidents that determined the course of his whole life. He 
had never before heard of Turner, but he was now so dazzled 
by the master's art that he spent hours in copying the sketches. 
Not only did these tours and this early fascination for Turner 
greatly influence Ruskin's own Hfe; they indirectly resulted, 
as we shall see, in a profound change in the attitude of Eng- 
land and of the world, towards art and art criticism. 

When he entered Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1836, 
his mother went with him and took lodgings near by. He won 
a Newdigate prize for a poem. He made a few friends. But 



INTRODUCTION 7 

there was still no dependence upon his own resources, — no 
advance in the wisdom of the world. 

In 1842, he was graduated from the university with a well- 
trained mind, but with almost no knowledge of what we con- 
sider the practical side of life. However, though his training 
had been narrow, it had been deep; if it had failed to give him 
the wisdom of experience, it had also spared him the doubts 
and fears that are too frequently the by-products of experi- 
ence. It had given him clear conceptions of work to be done, 
of wrongs to be righted, and of good to be established. Above 
all it had imparted to him boundless confidence in his own 
powers and ability. 

Ruskin was not happy in his love and marriage. When but 
seventeen years old, he fell in love with Adele Domecq, the 
charming daughter of his father's partner; and, as he says: 
"I was reduced to a heap of white ashes in four days." He 
sought to woo her by talking of '*the Spanish Armada, Water- 
loo, and transubstantiation," but utterly failed to impress 
this sophisticated French miss. Two years later, when at 
Oxford, he was prostrated on hearing of her marriage. In 
1847 he met Charlotte Lockhart, granddaughter of Sir Walter 
Scott — "Scottish fairy, white lady" — and, as he says, ''with 
my customary wisdom in such matters, I wooed her by writ- 
ing an article for the Quarterly Review.'^ Again his suit was 
unsuccessful. Then in 1848 he was married to Euphemia 
Chalmers Gray, a young lady for whom, upon her challenge 
to write a fairy story, he had, some six years earlier, written 
The King of the Golden River. She was beautiful, fond of so- 
ciety, and not interested in her husband's labor. He was ab- 
sorbed in his plans of authorship, cared nothing for society, 
and abominated dinners and like functions. After five years 
of this anomalous life, the marriage was annulled. 

In 1858, when Ruskin experienced his great revulsion from 
the evangelical faith in which he had been brought up — 
"was converted inside out," as he says — he began an acquaint- 
ance which later grew into the consuming passion of his life. 
In this year he was invited to give drawing lessons to three 
children, two girls and a boy, whose mother was an Irish 
lady, Mrs. La Touche. Rose, the youngest of the three, 
was less than twelve when the lessons began. She was 



8 INTRODUCTION 

a precocious child, with odd, oldish ways, and with a deeply 
sympathetic, artistic temper in her soul; and though he was 
twenty-eight years her senior, through the years of their 
acquaintance he came to love her. But she was of the evan- 
gelical sect, and would not give her heart to an "unbeliever." 
Ruskin would not profess what he did not believe. The two 
were estranged. Her health was frail, and she died in her 
twenty-fourth year, Ruskin being with her at the last. *'I 
live in the outside of me," he wrote. "The death numbed me 
for some days so that I couldn't work, but am none the worse, 
so far as I know, only there's no blood in my hands or feet." 
He wrote to his friend Miss Beever: "I wanted my Rosie 
here. In heaven I mean to go and talk to Pythagoras and 
Socrates and Valerius Publicola. I shan't care a bit for Rosie 
there, she needn't think it. What will gray eyes and rosy 
cheeks be good for there.?" And later he says: "I wonder 
mightily what sort of creature I should have turned out, if in- 
stead of the distracting and useless pain, I had had the joy of 
approved love, and the untellable, incalculable motive of its 
sympathy and praise. It seems to me such things are not al- 
lowed in this world. The men capable of the highest imag- 
inative passion are tossed on fiery waves by it." 

By Englishmen, Ruskin is closely associated, in the various 
phases of his activity, with his different homes. The little 
house in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, in the heart of 
London, the place of his birth, recalls the humble beginnings 
of his father, who inherited a vast debt from his father, and 
who waited nine years before marrying Margaret Cox, so that 
this debt might be wholly paid. When their boy John was 
four years old, they moved out to Heme Hill, then a country 
village, where they had a yard and garden. Here they lived 
through John Ruskin's childhood and early manhood. Here 
his first books were written, including The Stones of Venice 
in 1851-53. Then, the elder Ruskin having become very pros- 
perous, the family moved to Denmark Hill, a more preten- 
tious estate. The young man does not seem to have wholly 
loved this home, nor the display connected with it. On his 
mother's death in 1871, he purchased Brantwood, a beautiful 
country home on Lake Coniston, opposite the mountain 
called "The Old Man." It is with this home that the dearest, 



INTRODUCTION 9 

most intimate recollections of Ruskin by his friends are asso- 
ciated. Here he lived with his well-loved cousin, "Joannie" 
Agnew, at this time married to Arthur Severn. Here Prcs- 
terita and all his more intimate "letters" were written. And 
it was here that he spent the final years of illness alternating 
with feeble health, until death came, on January 20, 1900. 

The strongest impulse of his whole life was to teach. At 
the ridiculous age of four, this owlish baby had preached a 
sermon, which he spent most of his later life in amplifying: 
"People, be dood. If you are dood, Dod will love you; if you 
are not dood, Dod will not love you. People, be dood." At 
seven he was keeping a diary, in which, by drawings and 
notes, he recorded his observations; and at fifteen he had con- 
tributed an article to Lowden*s Magazine of Natural History. 
Now came into play the habit of close observation, of utter 
concentration. Now were brought to bear upon his judgment 
of art and nature, all the experience of the boy on the long 
carriage trips through England and the Continent. Most 
important of all, as far as his style is concerned, was the in- 
tensive reading of the Bible, which, with his mother, he had 
gone through about once every year, and the reading of Pil- 
grim s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Pope's Iliad, and Sir Wal- 
ter Scott, with his father. 

Ruskin's teaching took three forms, writing, lecturing (in 
schools and public), and doing. He was one of the most 
voluminous writers England has produced. His first great 
work was Volume I of Modern Painters, which appeared 
in 1843, a year after his graduation from Oxford. We have 
spoken of his early love for Turner; in this book his prime 
purpose was to defend and praise the work of this artist 
as the truest, most faithful to nature, most wholesome, 
and in all ways most inspiring and beautiful, not only of his 
own day, but of any since the time of Sir Joshua Reynolds. 
The book was a startling departure from the usual type of 
art criticism. It was addressed not so much to trained artists 
as to common people. It appealed to them to see and appre- 
ciate and love the beauty all about them — beauty of open 
sky, of field, of cloud, of sunset, of dawn, of dusk, of sea; and 
to adjudge those pictures best, which, like Turner's, depicted 
these beauties as they really are, and not after some worn-out 



lO INTRODUCTION 

conventional pattern. Its eloquence was compelling. While 
at first contemporary artists either held aloof, or joined the 
orthodox technical reviewers in open scorn and derision, and 
while Turner himself seems to have been overwhelmed, and 
surprised into a modest silence, there was no mistaking the 
general feeling that a new voice had made itself heard in the 
evaluation and criticism of art, and that a new teacher was 
seeking to lead his country to more general love of true beauty 
in art and nature. 

Four other volumes of Modern Painters followed, the fifth 
appearing in i860, and marking his last formal writing on art. 
These subsequent volumes, while they maintained the atti- 
tude of deep admiration for Turner, showed marked progress 
and growth in Ruskin's own judgment and appreciation. In 
these years he traveled and studied widely and deeply. Hence 
these volumes reflect a fuller and fairer appreciation of the 
art of earlier peoples, particularly of Italian artists, and of 
other men of his own day. 

His Seven Lamps of Architecture was completed in 1849, 
during his first year of married life. The "Lamps" were Sac- 
rifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, and Obedience. 
The book heaped criticism upon the prevailing modes of 
building in England. It deplored the use of cheap ornament 
and gewgaws, and any false splendor or pretense, and pleaded 
for structures built soundly, beautifully, and suitably. It 
exerted a very real influence upon Enghsh architectural style. 

The Stones of Venice (1851-53) was more than a criticism of 
Venetian architecture; it was a stirring appeal to modern 
nations to build wisely and honestly, not merely in material 
matters, but in laws and customs. 

The Political Economy of Art (1857) and The Two Paths 
(1859), first given as public lectures, mark the definite in- 
terest of Ruskin in economics and sociology, an interest 
that had been showing itself in his work for some time. He 
sensed the fact that while thousands were reading his books 
and were being measurably influenced by his teaching, mil- 
lions were left all untouched by what he said; and these mil- 
lions were the very ones he most desired to reach. More and 
more he saw why he was not reaching them: They were too 
poor, too tired to see or know beauty; they had been too little 



INTRODUCTION II 

considered in the scheme of things; they had been denied much 
in England's new age of industriahsm and materialism. And 
his soul cried out against the injustice that was forgetting the 
toilers. His protest took the form of a series of essays on po- 
litical economy in CornhiWs Magazine. In them he attacked 
that science as taught by Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, 
and scored their treatment of it on a cold, materialistic basis. 
**There is no wealth but life," he thundered. ''Life without 
industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality." 

The result was an angry protest from the readers of the 
magazine. "Had Ruskin gone crazy? What had got into 
this art critic (honored now in this field) that he should speak 
so wildly of things utterly beyond his knowledge.? How could 
a man write such puerile twaddle.?" The publisher, and his 
editor, Thackeray, became frightened at the storm, and noti- 
fied Ruskin that the series must stop with the fourth essay. 
The four were soon published under the name Unto this Last, 
but they had almost no sale for ten years. Ruskin stoutly 
maintained that they were the ''truest, rightest-worded " of 
all his works. Not only were they not read; they weakened 
his influence for a time in all directions; and in his later work 
we can frequently detect a note of bitterness and a feel- 
ing of defeat. To-day his economic teachings, though not 
carried out in all details, are almost universally accepted as 
sound and just. 

As early as 1853 Ruskin, at first against the wishes of his 
parents, had given public lectures; and most of his works pub- 
lished after i860, except Prceterita (1885-9), his autobiog- 
raphy, were produced first as lectures, or sometimes as letters. 
Thus: Munera Pulveris (1863), Time and Tide (1867), and 
Fors Clavigera (1871-84) were letters to workingmen; Ethics 
of the Dust was a collection of letters and talks on geol- 
ogy, crystals, and conduct, addressed to the girls of the Win- 
nington School; Sesame and Lilies (1864) contains three lec- 
tures, the first two of which were given at or near Man- 
chester, the third at Dublin; The Crown of Wild Olive is a 
group of three eloquent discussions on work, traffic, and war; 
Lectures on Art, The Art of England, and Pleasures of Eng- 
land were collections of his Oxford lectures. Less familiar, 
but scarcely less important, are: The Queen of the Air (1869), 



12 INTRODUCTION 

Aratra Pentelici (1870), Proserpina (1875-86), Mornings in 
Florence (1875-7), and The Laws of Fesole (1877-8). 

Ruskin was very popular and much sought for as a lecturer. 
Indeed, he complained that people were too much interested 
in listening to him, and not enough concerned with doing 
what he bade. For Ruskin was, above all, concerned with con- 
duct. His teaching never had mere instruction for its aim; 
he wanted to get things done. We have seen this in his books 
and in his lectures; we now shall see what he himself did when 
opportunity came his way. 

In 1864 his father died, leaving him the estate at Denmark 
Hill and a fortune of nearly a miUion dollars. In less than 
twenty years he had given away practically all of this in va- 
rious philanthropies: in endowing an art collection at Oxford; 
in improving housing conditions in London, in which work he 
was associated with Octavia Hill; in scattered charities, 
pensions, and the like, the extent of which will never be 
known; and in endowing and supporting St. George's Guild. 

This guild was a group of families organized into a com- 
munity by Ruskin for the purpose of carrying out his theories 
of sociology. There were specific rules of conduct for young 
and old, reaching down into the smallest detail. Each mem- 
ber had to subscribe to certain theological beliefs and formulas. 
Schools and the form and nature of education for the children 
were prescribed. The plan of the day's work for men and 
women was fixed, to the hour; so was the manner of dress. In 
fact, on becoming a member, one virtually gave up his indi- 
viduality. 

The project failed. It did not fit in with English temper- 
ament and tradition. While Ruskin no doubt succeeded in 
giving these members infinitely better working conditions 
than they would otherwise have had, and more comforts and 
pleasures, yet the Anglo-Saxon does not enjoy merging him- 
self into such a closely welded group. He is essentially indi- 
vidualistic. 

But Ruskin took much personal pride in seeing his theories 
in operation. He gave to them lavishly of time, energy, and 
money, and they showed that he had a valiant belief in his 
own teachings as set forth in his books and his lectures: that 
joy, beauty, love, and truth were meant for all, not for the few. 



INTRODUCTION 13 

There remains to be said something of his friendships: with 
Carlyle, for instance, who said of him— "There is a ray of real 
heaven in Ruskin, a celestial brightness" (Ruskin said of Car- 
lyle that " he was born in the clouds and struck by lightning ") ; 
with Charles Eliot Norton, Dr. Brown, Sir Henry Acland, 
Tennyson, the Brownings, D. G. Rossetti, and others. We 
have neglected the beautiful influence of women in his life — 
of Lady Trevelyan, Mrs. Cowper-Temple, Mrs. Carlyle, and 
his charming cousin " Joannie" Severn, who with her husband 
and children took care of him through all the years after his 
mother's death. The friendly, intimate, family aspects of his 
Hfe, particularly at Brantwood, show how gentle, modest, 
and devoted to his home circle was this world-teacher in his 
private Hfe; how he caused this epitaph to be placed upon his 
father's tomb: "He was an entirely honest merchant. * * * 
His son, who knew him, says this of him." We have only hinted 
at the close supervision his parents exercised over him to the 
day of their death, — except that he did have to cross his 
father in Unto this Last, the persistence of the son causing, 
for some time, a real estrangement. It was this of which he 
wrote in Prceterita: "I have to pray my readers to note that 
this continually increasing arrogance was not founded on van- 
ity in me, but on sorrow. There is a vast difference — there 
is all the difference — between the vanity of displaying one's 
own faculties, and the grief that other people do not use their 
own." 

The essentially sweet and tolerant side of the man in his 
chastened later years is well shown in the following extract 
from a letter to Rossetti: "My pleasures are in seeing, think- 
ing, reading, and making people happy (if I can, consistently 
with my own comfort) . And I take these pleasures. And I 
suppose, if my pleasures were in smoking, betting, dicing, and 
giving pain, I should take those pleasures. It seems to me 
that one man is made one way, and one another — the measure 
of effort and self-denial can never be known, except by each 
conscience to itself. Mine is small enough." 

As we read him, then, let us remember the limitations of 
his life; let us read with gentle patience and care; let us be 
carried on to high thoughts by his eloquence; but let us, above 
all, remember that he wants us to jeel and ^0, and not merely 



14 INTRODUCTION 

to listen and admire. For his message stirred to action; and 
he stands to-day, in his influence for the love of beauty, truth, 
and gentleness, the most potent figure of the Victorian era. 

RUSKIN'S STYLE 

The reader of Ruskin will do well to remember that 
this writer always speaks intimately, personally, directly. 
He never views a subject in a cool, impersonal, dispassionate 
manner. His own beliefs, feelings, desires, and — it must be 
admitted — sometimes his prejudices, color his work through- 
out. Any writer of this type becomes strongly self-assertive 
and frequently dogmatic. 

We can readily understand, further, that Ruskin's dog- 
matism was partly an outgrowth of his training. His educa- 
tion had been too irregular to afford thorough scholastic dis- 
cipline. Though he had an uncanny way of being right on 
most things, he did not reach the truth by scholarly methods, 
and he did not always defend the truth by fair arguments. 
Though ready to take infinite pains in copying a Turner land- 
scape, or studying the architecture of a Venetian ruin, when 
it came to setting down his conclusions, he was prone to make 
sweeping assertions about things of which he could have but 
slight knowledge. And he had a way of tossing oflF these gen- 
eralizations as though they had all been settled, and there was 
nothing to be said on the other side. Indeed, he frequently 
refused to try to see what there was on this ''other side." He 
never feared to set forth an opinion on a subject; and that 
opinion was, at the time, final. Of course, this made enemies. 
**It is,'' thinks Mr. A. C. Benson, "the most dangerous qual- 
ity in the world." 

Much of this feeling of dogmatism in Ruskin, however, 
comes from a peculiarity of his style. If you will notice a 
railway curve of extensive radius, you will see that instead of 
being a real arc it is made up of short straight lines. Yet the 
result of the whole is a curve, around which the train goes 
successfully and arrives at its destination. This illustrates 
Ruskin's style. He rarely qualifies his thoughts; there is no 
**if" or **I think," or "it seems to me." The sentence stands 
apparently as a statement which is to be understood as being 



INTRODUCTION 15 

always and absolutely true. This may be irritating to the 
reader, who feels inclined to challenge many of these state- 
ments. The thoughtful reader of the following lectures will 
frequently find sentences with which he flatly disagrees. 
Often it will be hard for him to keep his temper as he reads; 
but he will find it most profitable to read the paragraph or 
the section through to the end so as to get Ruskin's whole 
thought. Then he will probably find that the particular state- 
ments which he challenges are really short straight lines in a 
large curve of thought, and that he is brought to a conclusion 
with which he finds himself in entire accord. 

Closely connected with this quality of Ruskin's style is an- 
other which amounts at times to a serious fault. It is his lack 
of perspective. One has a feeling always in these essays, of 
tensity, of almost feverish strain. There is little or no relaxa- 
tion; everything is presented as of utmost importance. The 
result of this is, first, to tire the reader. He has a sense of 
being pressed and even scolded too much of the time. There 
is a feeling that he should have a resting place and relaxation. 
The second result is that the great points of the essay fail to 
stand out as they should. In essays as long as these are, when 
every statement is made to seem of such imminent impor- 
tance, the central truth is sometimes obscured. 

This fault also can be referred to Ruskin's life. His ill 
health had much to do with it. He lived intensely. The pres- 
ent moment was always important with him. The particular 
ill or injustice that he happened to be attacking was to him 
the most important, most despicable, most unnecessary evil in 
the world. When he saw a young lady injure her life by hold- 
ing to a peculiar and particular religious doctrine, it seemed 
to him that the most important thing in the world for all girls 
to do was to keep away from theology. When he saw beauti- 
ful valleys spoiled by railways, it seemed to him that the 
worst thing a capitalist could do was to mar the beauty of 
scenery with his engines and their soot. He could see just one 
thing at a time and just one side of that thing. This, of course, 
constantly subjected him to criticism for narrowness, for ig- 
norance, and even for misrepresentation. One of the first 
things, therefore, that anybody must learn who is to enjoy 
Ruskin, is to read his passages through and read portions of 



l6 INTRODUCTION 

various parts of his work written at different periods of his 
life, to see how really broad and tolerant were the interests of 
this apparently narrow and intolerant man. 

Then, too, Ruskin's purpose in his lectures, and the condi- 
tions under which he had to work in accomplishing that pur- 
pose should be kept in mind. He was very much in the pub- 
lic eye and he knew that what he said would have wide 
circulation. He knew, too, that there were no more smug, self- 
complacent people in the world at that time than the English. 
The introduction of machinery had lent a marked impetus to 
industry. England was fairly prosperous and very well satis- 
fied with herself. Ruskin reckoned, and probably rightly, 
that the only way he could get his countrymen to attend to 
him and "mind" him, was to hit them, stir them, jolt them. 
No doubt much of his teasing dogmatism has its source in 
this purpose. He wanted to bother — one might almost say 
"irritate" — his hearers. At any rate, the last thing in the 
world he wanted to do, was to please them. He spoke with 
glee in writing to Carlyle in anticipation of the fourth of the 
Unto this Last essays, of the "smasher" that paper would be. 
He was still smarting from the reception of his economic 
teachings. He knew the temper of his audiences — their leth- 
argy and indifference. One should think of these essays, then, 
as lectures meant to awaken spiritual ideals and apprecia- 
tion in a people that were in a stupor of materialistic self- 
satisfaction. 

We have been considering, almost exclusively, our author's 
limitations. What, then, were the sources of his strength ? It 
is the belief of many that no English prose excels his in beauty, 
force, and potency. His sentence cadence, his diction, shot 
through as it is with scriptural and classical references, his 
rich imagery and alert sense of subtle relationships, all delight 
and entrance the sympathetic reader. By his apparent fail- 
ure, he gained in force. No man, with full knowledge, in his 
youth, of the almost sure failure that would attend his work, 
could have attacked his task with the zeal of Ruskin. No 
scholar, waiting to verify everj^thing he said, could have said 
so much. No thoroughly fair mind could have said so un- 
equivocally the one thing needful. 

But it would be unfortunate indeed to leave the impres- 



INTRODUCTION 1 7 

sion that his work failed. The ridicule, even of his eco- 
nomic teachings, lasted scarcely through his life; then the 
slow world saw that he was right, and began to follow 
his teaching. We are told by Mr. E. T. Cook in his biog- 
raphy, that in 1906 when there was a strong labor element 
represented in Parliament, the members were asked to indi- 
cate what man had most influenced them in their sympathy 
with reform; the name that appeared most frequently in the 
replies was John Ruskin. His teachings in art and architec- 
ture profoundly affected the thought of the world and its at- 
titude towards the beautiful and its judgment of what was 
beautiful. Nothing better illustrates this than a verse from 
Punch (Ruskin's family crest — at which he himself always 
poked fun — was a boar's head; hence the *'tusk"): 

I paints and paints, 
Hears no complaints, 

And sells before I'm dry; 
Till savage Ruskin 
Sticks his tusk in, 

Then nobody will buy! 

Apparently never physically strong; always highly sensi- 
tive to the criticism that was heaped upon him, particularly 
when his Unto this Last essays were discontinued in Corn- 
hilVs; feeling keenly the ridicule his guild plans were meeting; 
the last twenty years of his life more or less darkened by se- 
rious mental breakdown and delirium — it is small wonder that 
he produced writing that seems at times disproportionate, irn- 
patient, and dogmatic. When we consider the tremendous 
volume of work he turned out, the thousands of drawings he 
made (for he was an indefatigable copyist, working frequently 
with a microscope to secure absolute accuracy, — though he 
could not, as he says, "compose a picture") the lectures he 
delivered, the visits he made to schools, the studies he made 
of rocks, the teaching he eflPected, the good he did; — and when 
we remember that his life was frequently broken by prostrat- 
ing illnesses, we must marvel at the accomplishments of this 
miraculous man. 

Says Frederic Harrison {John Ruskin^ English Men of 
Letters series): 

"The Pedantic, pseudo-scientific Plutonomy, or Science of 



1 8 INTRODUCTION 

Wealth, which he denounced, is [now] as dead as Alchemy 
or Phlogiston. His notion that economic prosperity is 
subordinate to the well-being of the people is the axiom of 
politicians as of Philosophers. His idea that the wise use of 
wealth, the distribution of products, the health and happiness 
of the producers, come before the accumulation of wealth, is 
a commonplace, not of philanthropists, but of statesmen and 
journalists. His appeal for organization of industry, the 
suppression of public nuisances, the restriction of all anti- 
social abuses, is a truism to the reformers of to-day. So is 
much of what he said about national education long years 
before Mr. Forster, about old-age pensions long years before 
Mr. Chamberlain, about the housing of the working classes 
long years before the Statutes, Conferences, and Royal Com- 
missions of our own generation. Read all he says as to the 
necessity of training schools, technical schools, State super- 
vision of practical and physical education, help to the unem- 
ployed, provision for the aged, the recovery of waste lands, 
the qualified ownership of the soil, the reprobation of men 
who * would put the filth of tobacco even into the first breeze 
of a May morning' — read all these glancings of a keen and 
pure soul from heaven to earth on a multitude of things so- 
cial and humane, and you will recognize how truly John 
Ruskin forty years ago was a pioneer of the things which 
to-day the best spirits of our time so earnestly yearn to see." * 

* Used by permission of The Macmillan Company, publishers. 



CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY 

1819. Born in London, Brunswick Square. 

1823. Parents moved out four miles to Heme Hill. 

1833. First visit to Switzerland. 

1840. Met Turner. 

1841. First long visit to Venice. 

1842. B. A., Oxford. Parents removed to Denmark Hill. 

1843. Modern Painters^ Vol. I (by **A Graduate of Oxford"). 
1846. Modern Painters^ Vol. H. 

1848. Married. 

1849. Seven Lamps of Architecture. 
185 1-3. Stones of Venice. 

1854. Marriage annulled. 

1855. Modern Painters^ Vols. HI, IV. 

1856. Elements of Drawing. 

1857. Political Economy of Art {A Joy Forever). 

1858. Renounced Evangelical creed — ("Converted inside out"). 

Gave first lessons to Rose LaTouche. 
i860. Modern Painters ^ Vol. V. Unto this Last. 

1 863 . Munera Pulveris. 

1864. Father died, leaving fortune, most of which the son expended 

in various philanthropic plans. Sesame and Lilies. 

1866. The Crown of Wild Olive; Ethics of the Dust. 

1867. LL.D., Cambridge. 

1870. Slade professorship, Oxford. 

1871. Mother died. Brantwood, Coniston, purchased. Guild of 

St. George founded. 
1875. Rose LaTouche died. 
1871-84. Fors Clavigera. 
1885. Resigned from Oxford professorship, partly because of ill 

health, and partly because of the introduction of the 

practice of vivisection. 
1885-9. PrcBterita. 
1900. Died. 



19 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Prceterita. Ruskln's autobiography. 

Lije of John Ruskin. E. T. Cook. 2 vols., George Allen, 
London, 191 1. (The standard biography.) 

Ruskin: A Study in Personality. A. C. Benson. 

John Ruskin. Frederic Harrison. In '* English Men of 
Letters" series. 

Ruskin and His Circle. Ada Earl and. 

Home Life of Great Authors. H. T. Griswold. 

Social Ideals in English Letters. V. D. Scudder. Three chap- 
ters on Ruskin. 

Victorian Prose Masters. W. C. Brownell. 

Life of John Ruskin. W. P. Collingwood. 

Little Journeys to Homes of Great Men. Elbert Hubbard. 

The Works of John Ruskin. Edited by Charles Eliot Norton. 



20 



AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1871 

Being now fifty-one years old, and little likely to change my 
mind hereafter on any important subject of thought (unless 
through weakness of age), I wish to publish a connected 
series of such parts of my works as now seem to me right, 
and likely to be of permanent use. In doing so I shall omit 
much, but not attempt to amend what I think worth re- 
printing. A young man necessarily writes otherwise than 
an old one, and it would be worse than wasted time to try to 
recast the juvenile language: nor is it to be thought that I am 
ashamed even of what I cancel; for great part of my earlier 
work was rapidly written for temporary purposes, and is now 
unnecessary, though true, even to truism. What I wrote 
about religion, was, on the contrary, painstaking, and I think, 
forcible, as compared with most religious writing; especially 
in its frankness and fearlessness: but it was wholly mistaken; " 
for I had been educated in the doctrines of a narrow sect, 
and had read history as obliquely as sectarians necessarily 
must. 

The first book of which a new edition is required chances 
to be Sesame and Lilies, * * * to which I add a lecture given 
in Ireland on a subject closely connected with that of the 
book itself. I am glad that it should be the first of the com- 
plete series, for many reasons; though in now looking over 
these lectures, I am painfully struck by the waste of good 
work in them. They cost me much thought, and much 
strong emotion; but it was foolish to suppose that I could 
rouse my audiences in a little while to any sympathy with 

A superior n indicates a note at the end of this volume. The footnotes 
throughout are Ruskin's own. 

21 



22 PREFACE 

the temper into which I had brought myself by years of 
thinking over subjects full of pain;'* while, if I missed my 
purpose at the time, it was little to be hoped I could attain 
it afterwards; since phrases written for oral delivery become 
ineffective when quietly read. 

I think, however, if I now say briefly and clearly what I 
meant my hearers to understand, and what I wanted, and 
still would fain have, them to do, there may afterwards 
be found some better service in the passionately written 
text. 

The first Lecture says, or tries to say, that, life being very 
short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none 
of them in reading valueless books; and that valuable books 
should, in a civilized country, be within the reach of every- 
one, printed in excellent form, for a just price; but not in any 
vile, vulgar, or, by reason of smallness of type, physically 
injurious form,** at a vile price. For we none of us need many 
books, and those which we need ought to be clearly printed, 
on the best paper, and strongly bound. And though we are, 
indeed, now a wretched and poverty-struck nation, and 
hardly able to keep soul and body together, still, as no person 
in decent circumstances would put on his table confessedly 
bad wine, or bad meat, without being ashamed, so he need 
not have on his shelves ill-printed or loosely and wretchedly- 
stitched books; for, though few can be rich, yet every man 
who honestly exerts himself may, I think, still provide, for 
himself and his family, good shoes, good gloves, strong harness 
for his cart or carriage horses, and stout leather binding for 
his books. And I would urge upon every young man, as the 
beginning of his due and wise provision for his household, to 
obtain as soon as he can, by the severest economy, a re- 
stricted, serviceable, and steadily — however slowly — in- 
creasing, series of books for use through life; * * * and one 
of the earliest and strictest lessons to the children of the house 
being how to turn the pages of their own literary possessions 



PREFACE 23 

lightly and deliberately, with no chance of tearing or dogs' 
ears. 

That is my notion of the founding of Kings' Treasuries; 
and the first Lecture is intended to show somewhat the use 
and preciousness of their treasures: but the two following ones 
have wider scope, being written in the hope of awakening 
the youth of England, so far as my poor words might have 
any power with them, to take some thought of the purposes 
of the life into which they are entering, and the nature of the 
world they have to conquer. 

These two lectures are fragmentary and ill-arranged, but 
not, I think, diffuse or much compressible. The entire gist 
and conclusion of them, however, is in the last six paragraphs, 
135 to the end, of the third lecture, which I would beg the 
reader to look over not once nor twice (rather than any other 
part of the book), for they contain the best expression I have 
yet been able to put in words of what, so far as is within my 
power, I mean henceforward both to do myself, and to plead 
with all over whom 1 have any influence, to do also according 
to their means: the letters begun on the first day of this year, 
to the workmen of England, having the object of originating, 
if possible, this movement among them, in true alliance with 
whatever trustworthy element of help they can find in the 
higher classes. After these paragraphs, let me ask you to 
read, by the fiery light of recent events, the fable at § 117, and 
then §§ 129-13 1 ; and observe, my statement respecting 
the famine at Orissa is not rhetorical, but certified by official 
documents as within the truth. Five hundred thousand 
persons, at least, died by starvation in our British dominions, 
wholly in consequence of carelessness and want of fore- 
thought. Keep that well in your memory; and note it as the 
best possible illustration of modern political economy " in 
true practice, and of the relations it has accomplished between 
Supply and Demand. Then begin the second lecture, and 
all will read clear enough, I think, to the end; only, since that 
second lecture was written, questions have arisen respecting 



24 PREFACE 

the education and claims of women which have greatly 
troubled simple minds and excited restless ones. I am some- 
times asked my thoughts on this matter, and I suppose that 
some girl readers of the second lecture may at the end of it 
desire to be told summarily what I would have them do and 
desire in the present state of things. This, then, is what I 
would say to any girl who had confidence enough in me to 
believe what I told her, or do what I ask her. 

First, be quite sure of one thing, that, however much you 
may know, and whatever advantages you may possess, and 
however good you may be, you have not been singled out, 
by the God who made you, from all the other girls in the 
world, to be especially informed respecting His own nature 
and character." You have not been born in a luminous point 
upon the surface of the globe, where a perfect theology might 
be expounded to you from your youth up, and where every- 
thing you were taught would be true, and everything that 
was enforced upon you, right. Of all the insolent, all the 
fooHsh persuasions that by any chance could enter and hold 
your empty little heart, this is the proudest and foolishest, — 
that you have been so much the darHng of the Heavens, and 
favorite of the Fates, as to be born in the very nick of time, 
and in the punctual place, when and where pure Divine truth 
had been sifted from the errors of the Nations; and that your 
papa had been providentially disposed to buy a house in the 
convenient neighborhood of the steeple under which that 
Immaculate and final verity would be beautifully proclaimed. 
Do not think it, child; it is not so. This, on the contrary, is 
the fact, — unpleasant you may think it; pleasant, it seems 
to me^ — that you, with all your pretty dresses, and dainty 
looks, and kindly thoughts, and saintly aspirations, are not 
one whit more thought of or loved by the great Maker and 
Master than any poor little red, black, or blue savage, running 
wild in the pestilent woods, or naked on the hot sands of 
the earth: and that, of the two, you probably know less 
about God than she does; the only difference being that 



PREFACE 25 

she thinks Httle of Him that is right, and you, much that is 
wrong. 

That, then, is the first thing to make sure of; — that you 
are not yet perfectly well informed on the most abstruse 
of all possible subjects, and that, if you care to behave 
with modesty or propriety, you had better be silent 
about it. 

The second thing which you may make sure of is, that 
however good you may be, you have faults; that however 
dull you may be, you can find out what some of them are; 
and that however slight they may be, you had better make 
some — not too painful, but patient — eflPort to get quit of 
them. And so far as you have confidence in me at all, trust 
me for this, that how many soever you may find or fancy 
your faults to be, there are only two that are of real con- 
sequence, — Idleness and Cruelty." Perhaps you may be 
proud. Well, we can get much good out of pride, if only it 
be not religious. Perhaps you may be vain: it is highly 
probable; and very pleasant for the people who like to praise 
you. Perhaps you are a little envious: that is really very 
shocking; but then — so is everybody else. Perhaps, also, 
you are a little malicious, which I am truly concerned to hear, 
but should probably only the more, if I knew you, enjoy 
your conversation. But whatever else you may be, you must 
not be useless, and you must not be cruel. If there is any 
one point which, in six thousand years of thinking about right 
and wrong, wise and good men have agreed upon, or success- 
ively by experience discovered, it is that God dislikes idle 
and cruel people more than any others; — that His first order 
is, "Work while you have light;" and His second, "Be 
merciful while you have mercy." 

"Work while you have light," especially while you have 
the light of morning. There are few things more wonderful 
to me than that old people never tell " young ones how pre- 
cious their youth is. They sometimes sentimentally regret 
their own earlier days; sometimes prudently forget them; 



26 PREFACE 

often foolishly rebuke the young, often more foolishly indulge, 
often most foolishly thwart and restrain; but scarcely ever 
warn or watch them. Remember, then, that I, at least, have 
warned you, that the happiness of your life, and its power, and 
its part and rank in earth or in heaven, depend on the way 
you pass your days now. They are not to be sad days; far 
from that, the first duty of young people is to be delighted 
and delightful; but they are to be in the deepest sense solemn 
days. There is no solemnity so deep, to a rightly-thinking 
creature, as that of dawn. But not only in that beautiful 
sense, but in all their character and method, they are to be 
solemn days. Take your Latin dictionary, and look out 
sollemnis, and fix the sense of the word well in your mind, 
and remember that every day of your early life is ordaining 
irrevocably, for good or evil, the custom and practice of your 
soul; ordaining either sacred customs of dear and lovely 
recurrence, or trenching deeper and deeper the furrows for 
seed of sorrow. Now, therefore, see that no day passes in 
which you do not make yourself a somewhat better creature: 
and in order to do that, find out, first, what you are now. 
Do not think vaguely about it; take pen and paper, and 
write down as accurate a description of yourself as you can, 
with the date to it. If you dare not do so, find out why you 
dare not, and try to get strength of heart enough to look your- 
self fairly in the face in mind as well as body. I do not 
doubt but that the mind is a less pleasant thing to look at 
than the face, and for that very reason it needs more looking 
at; so always have two mirrors on your toilet table, and see 
that with proper care you dress body and mind before them 
daily. After the dressing is once over for the day, think no 
more about it: as your hair will blow about your ears, so 
your temper and thoughts will get ruflHed with the day's 
work, and may need, sometimes, twice dressing; but I don't 
want you to carry about a mental pocket comb; only to be 
smooth braided always in the morning. 

Write down then, frankly, what you are, or, at least, what 



PREFACE 27 

you think yourself, not dwelling upon those inevitable faults 
which I have just told you are of little consequence, and 
which the action of a right life will shake or smooth away; 
but that you may determine to the best of your intelligence 
what you are good for, and can be made into. You will find 
that the mere resolve not to be useless, and the honest desire 
to help other people, will, in the quickest and delicatest ways-, 
improve yourself. Thus, from the beginning, consider all 
your accomplishments as means of assistance to others; 
read attentively, in this volume, paragraphs 74, 75, 19, and 
79, and you will understand what I mean, with respect to 
languages and music. * * * 

Then, * * * resolve to do every day something that is 
useful in the vulgar sense. Learn first thoroughly the econ- 
omy of the kitchen; the good and bad qualities of every 
common article of food, and the simplest and best modes of 
their preparation: when you have time, go and help in the 
cooking of poorer families, and show them how to make as 
much of everything as possible, and how to make little, nice; 
coaxing and tempting them into tidy and pretty ways, and 
pleading for well-folded tablecloths, however coarse, and for 
a flower or two out of the garden to strew on them. If you 
manage to get a clean tablecloth, bright plates on it, and a 
good dish in the middle, of your own cooking, you may ask 
leave to say a short grace; and let your religious ministries be 
confined to that much for the present." 

Again, let a certain part of your day (as little as you choose, 
but not to be broken in upon) be set apart for making strong 
and pretty dresses for the poor. Learn the sound qualities 
of all useful stuffs, and make everything of the best you can 
get, whatever its price. * * * Then, every day, make some 
little piece of useful clothing," sewn with your own fingers as 
strongly as it can be stitched; and embroider it or otherwise 
beautify it moderately with fine needlework, such as a girl 
may be proud of having done. And accumulate these things 
by you until you hear of some honest persons in need of 



28 PREFACE 

clothing, which may often too sorrowfully be; and, even 
though you should be deceived, and give them to the dis- 
honest, and hear of their being at once taken to the pawn- 
broker's, never mind that, for the pawnbroker must sell them 
to some one who has need of them. * * * 

Then, secondly, I said, you are not to be cruel. Perhaps 
you think there is no chance of your being so; and indeed I 
hope it is not likely that you should be deliberately unkind 
to any creature; but unless you are deliberately kind to every 
creature, you will often be cruel to many. * * * 

It is not likely that the more accurate methods of recent 
mental education will now long permit young people to grow 
up in the persuasion that, in any danger or distress, they may 
expect to be themselves saved by the Providence of God, 
while those around them are lost by His Improvidence: " but 
they may be yet long restrained from rightly kind action, 
and long accustomed to endure both their own pain occa- 
sionally, and the pain of others always, with an unwise 
patience, by misconception of the eternal and incurable 
nature of real evil. Observe, therefore, carefully in this 
matter: there are degrees of pain, as degrees of faithfulness, 
which are altogether conquerable, and which seem to be 
merely forms of wholesome trial or discipline. Your fingers 
tingle when you go out on a frosty morning, and are all the 
warmer afterwards; your limbs are weary with wholesome 
work, and lie down in the pleasanter rest; you are tried for a 
little while by having to wait for some promised good, and 
it is all the sweeter when it comes. But you cannot carry the 
trial past a certain point. Let the cold fasten on your hand 
in an extreme degree, and your fingers will molder from their 
sockets. Fatigue yourself, but once, to utter exhaustion, 
and to the end of life you shall not recover the former vigor 
of your frame. Let heartsickness pass beyond a certain 

bitter point, and the heart loses its life for ever. 

******** 

Think carefully and bravely over these things, and you 



PREFACE 29 

will find them true: having found them so, think also care- 
fully over your own position in life. I assume that you belong 
to the middle or upper classes. * * * You have, then, I 
suppose, good food, pretty rooms to live in, pretty dresses 
to wear, power of obtaining every rational and wholesome 
pleasure; you are, moreover, probably gentle, and grateful, 
and in the habit of every day thanking God for these things. 
But why do you thank Him? Is it because, in these matters, 
as well as in your religious knowledge, you think He has 
made a favorite of you? Is the essential meaning of your 
thanksgiving, ''Lord, I thank thee" that I am not as other 
girls are, not in that I fast twice in the week while they feast, 
but in that I feast seven times a week while they fast," and 
are you quite sure this is a pleasing form of thanksgiving to 
your Heavenly Father? Suppose you saw one of your own 
true earthly sisters, Lucy or Emily, cast out of your mortal 
father's house, starving, helpless, heartbroken; and that 
every morning when you went into your father's room, you 
said to him, "How good you are, father, to give me what you 
don't give Lucy," are you sure that, whatever anger your 
parent might have just cause for, against your sister, he 
would be pleased by that thanksgiving, or flattered by that 
praise? Nay, are you even sure that you are so much the 
favorite: suppose that, all this while, he loves poor Lucy just 
as well as you, and is only trying you through her pain, and 
perhaps not angry with her in anywise, but deeply angry 
with you, and all the more for your thanksgivings ? Would it 
not be well that you should think, and earnestly too, over 
this standing of yours; and all the more if you wish to believe 
that text, which clergymen so much dislike preaching on, 
"How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the King- 
dom of God?" You do not believe it now, or you would be 
less complacent in your state; and you cannot believe it at 
all, until you know that the Kingdom of God means — "not 
meat and drink,"* but justice, peace, and joy in the Holy 
Ghost," nor until you know also that such joy is not by any 



30 PREFACE 

means, necessarily, in going to church, or in singing hymns; 
but may be joy in a dance," or joy in a jest, or joy in anything 
you have deserved to possess, or that you are willing to give; 
but joy in nothing that separates you, as by any strange 
favor, from your fellow creatures, that exalts you through 
their degradation — exempts you from their toil — or indulges 

you in time of their distress. 

******** 

That, then, is the substance of what I would fain say con- 
vincingly, if it might be, to my girl friends; at all events with 
certainty in my own mind that I was thus far a safe guide 
to them. 

For other and older readers it is needful I should write a 
few words more, respecting what opportunity I have had to 
judge, or right I have to speak, of such things; for, indeed, 
too much of what I have said about women has been said 
in faith only. A wise and lovely English lady told me, when 
Sesame and Lilies first appeared, that she was sure the 
Sesame would be useful, but that in the Lilies I had been 
writing of what I knew nothing about. Which was in a 
measure too true, and also that it is more partial than my 
writings are usually: for * * * I wrote the Lilies to please 
one girl; " and were it not for what I remember of her, and 
of few besides, should now perhaps recast some of the sen- 
tences in the Lilies in a very different tone: for as years 
have gone by, it has chanced to me, untowardly in some re- 
spects, fortunately in others (because it enables me to read 
history more clearly), to see the utmost evil that is in women, 
while I have had but to believe the utmost good. The best 
women are indeed necessarily the most difficult to know; 
they are recognized chiefly in the happiness of their husbands 
and the nobleness of their children; they are only to be di- 
vined, not discerned, by the stranger; and, sometimes, seem 
almost helpless except in their homes; yet without the help 
of one** of them,^ to whom this book is dedicated, the day 



PREFACE 31 

would probably have come before now, when I should have 
written and thought no more. 

On the other hand, the fashion of the time renders what- 
ever is forward, coarse, or senseless, in feminine nature, 
too palpable to all men: — the weak picturesqueness of my 
earlier writings brought me acquainted with much of their 
emptiest enthusiasm; and the chances of later life gave me 
opportunities of watching women in states of degradation and 
vindictiveness which opened to me the gloomiest secrets of 
Greek and Syrian tragedy. * * * But my trust is still un- 
moved in the preciousness of the natures that are so fatal in 
their error, and I leave the words of the Lilies unchanged; 
believing, yet, that no man ever lived a right life who had 
not been chastened by a woman's love, strengthened by her 
courage, and guided by her discretion. 

What I might myself have been," so helped, I rarely indulge 
in the idleness of thinking; but what I am since I take on me 
the function of a teacher, it is well that the reader should 
know, as far as I can tell him. 

Not an unjust person; not an unkind one; not a false one; 
a lover of order, labor, and peace. That, it seems to me, is 
enough to give me right to say all I care to say on ethical 
subjects: more, I could only tell definitely through details of 
autobiography such as none but prosperous and (in the 
simple sense of the word) faultless, lives could justify; — 
and mine has been neither. Yet, if anyone, skilled in 
reading the torn manuscripts of the human soul, cares 
for more intimate knowledge of me, he may have it by 
knowing with what persons in past history I have most 
sympathy. 

I will name three. 

In all that is strongest and deepest in me, — that fits me 
for my work, and gives light or shadow to my being, — I have 
sympathy with Guido Guinicelli." 

In my constant natural temper, and thoughts of things 
and of people, with Marmontel." 



32 PREFACE 

In my enforced and accidental temper, and thoughts of 
things and of people, with Dean Swift." 

Anyone who can understand the natures of those three 
men, can understand mine: and having said so much, I am 
content to leave both life and work to be remembered or 
forgotten, as their uses may deserve. 

Denmark Hill, ist January, 1871. 



SESAME AND LILIES'* 



LECTURE I— SESAME 
OF kings' treasuries 

"You shall each have a cake of sesame, — and ten pound." 

— Lucian:» The Fisherman. 

I. My first duty this evening is to ask your pardon for the 
ambiguity of title under which the subject of lecture has 
been announced: for indeed I am not going to talk of kings, 
known as regnant, nor of treasuries, understood to contain 
wealth; but of quite another order of royalty, and another 
material of riches, than those usually acknowledged. I had 
even intended to ask your attention for a little while on 
trust, and (as sometimes one contrives, in taking a friend to 
see a favorite piece of scenery) to hide what I wanted most 
to show, with such imperfect cunning as I might, until we 
had unexpectedly reached the best point of view by winding 
paths. But — and as also I have heard it said, by men prac- 
ticed in public address, that hearers are never so much 
fatigued as by the endeavor to follow a speaker who gives 
them no clue to his purpose, I will take the slight mask off 
at once, and tell you plainly that I want to speak to you 
about the treasures hidden in books; and about the way we 
find them, and the way we lose them. A grave subject, 
you will say; and a wide one! Yes; so wide that I shall make 
no effort to touch the compass of it. I will try only to bring 
before you a few simple thoughts about reading, as I watch 

33 



34 SESAME AND LILIES 

the course of the public mind with respect to our daily en- 
larging means of education; and the answeringly wider 
spreading, on the levels, of the irrigation of literature. 

2. It happens that I have practically some connection 
with schools" for different classes of youth; and I receive 
many letters from parents respecting the education of their 
children. In the mass of these letters, I am always struck 
by the precedence which the idea of a "position in life" takes 
above all other thoughts in the parents' — more especially 
in the mothers' — minds. "The education befitting such 
and such a station in life'' — this is the phrase, this is the 
object, always. They never seek, as far as I can make out, 
an education good in itself; even the conception of abstract 
tightness in training rarely seems reached by the writers. 
But, an education "which shall keep a good coat on my son's 
back; — which shall enable him to ring with confidence the 
visitors' bell at double-belled doors;" which shall result ulti- 
mately in establishment of a double-belled door to his own 
house; in a word, which shall lead to advancement in life; 
this we pray for on bent knees — and this is all we pray for." 
It never seems to occur to the parents that there may be 
an education which, in itself, is advancement in Life; — 
that any other than that may perhaps be advancement in 
Death; and that this essential education might be more 
easily got, or given, than they fancy, if they set about it in 
the right way; while it is for no price, and by no favor, to 
be got, if they set about it in the wrong. 

3. Indeed, among the ideas most prevalent and eflPective 
in the mind of this busiest of countries, I suppose the first — 
at least that which is confessed with the greatest frankness, 
and put forward as the fittest stimulus to youthful exertion — 
is this of "Advancement in Life." May I ask you to 
consider with mej what this idea practically includes, and 
what it should include? 

Practically, then, at present, "advancement in life" means, 
becoming conspicuous in life; — obtaining a position which 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 35 

shall be acknowledged by others to be respectable or honor- 
able. We do not understand by this advancement, in general, 
the mere making of money, but the being known to have 
made it; not the accomplishment of any great aim, but the 
being seen to have accomplished it. In a word, we mean 
the gratification of our thirst for applause. That thirst, if 
the last infirmity of noble minds," is also the first infirmity 
of weak ones; and, on the whole, the strongest impulsive 
influence of average humanity: the greatest eff^orts of the 
race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as its 
greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure." 

4. I am not about to attack or defend this impulse. I 
want you only to feel how it lies at the root of effort; especially 
of all modern effort. It is the gratification of vanity which 
is, with us, the stimulus of toil and balm of repose; so closely 
does it touch the very springs of life that the wounding of 
our vanity is always spoken of (and truly) as in its measure 
mortal; " we call it "mortification," using the same expression 
which we should apply to a gangrenous and incurable bodily 
hurt. And although few of us may be physicians enough 
to recognize the various effect of this passion upon health 
and energy, I believe most honest men know, and would at 
once acknowledge, its leading power with them as a motive. 
The seaman does not commonly desire to be made captain 
only because he knows he can manage the ship better than 
any other sailor on board. He wants to be made captain 
that he may be called captain. The clergyman does not 
usually want to be made a bishop only because he believes 
that no other hand can, as firmly as his, direct the diocese 
through its diflRculties. He wants to be made bishop pri- 
marily that he may be called "My Lord." " And a prince 
does not usually desire to enlarge, or a subject to gain, a king- 
dom, because he believes that no one else can as well serve 
the State, upon its throne, but, briefly, because he wishes to 
be addressed as "Your Majesty," by as many lips as may 
be brought to such utterance. '" 



36 SESAME AND LILIES 

5. This, then, being the main idea of "advancement in 
life," the force of it appHes, for all of u^, according to our sta- 
tion, particularly to that secondary result of such advance- 
ment which we call "getting into good society." We want to 
get into good society not that we may have it, but that we 
may be seen in it; and our notion of its goodness depends 
primarily on its conspicuousness. 

Will you pardon me if I pause for a moment to put what 
I fear you may think an impertinent question? I never can 
go on with an address unless I feel, or know, that my audience 
are either with me or against me: I do not much care which, 
in the beginning; but I must know where they are; and I 
would fain find out, at this instant, whether you think I am 
putting the motives of popular action too low. I am resolved 
to-night, to state them low enough to be admitted as prob- 
able; for whenever, in my writings on Political Economy," 
I assume that a little honesty, or generosity, — or what used 
to be called "virtue" — may be calculated upon as a human 
motive of action, people always answer me, saying, "You 
must not calculate on that: that is not in human nature: 
you must not assume anything to be common to men but 
acquisitiveness and jealousy; no other feeling ever has in- 
fluence on them, except accidentally, and in matters out of 
the way of business." I begin accordingly, to-night, low 
in the scale of motives; but I must know if you think me 
right in doing so. Therefore, let me ask those who admit 
the love of praise to be usually the strongest motive in men's 
minds in seeking advancement, and the honest desire of 
doing any kind of duty to be an entirely secondary one, to 
hold up their hands. {About a dozen hands held up — the 
audience, partly not being sure the lecturer is serious, and, partly, 
shy of expressing opinion.) I am quite serious — I really 
do want to know what you think; however, I can judge by 
putting the reverse question. Will those who think that 
duty is generally the first, and love of praise the second 
motive, hold up their hands? {O^ie hand reported to have 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 37 

been held up, behind the lecturer.) Very good: I see you are 
with me, and that you think I have not begun too near the 
ground. Now, without teasing you by putting farther ques- 
tion, I venture to assume that you will admit duty as at least 
a secondary or tertiary " motive. You think that the desire 
of doing something useful, or obtaining some real good, is 
indeed an existent collateral « idea, though a secondary one, 
in most men's desire of advancement. You will grant that 
moderately honest men desire place and office, at least in 
some measure for the sake of their beneficent power; and 
would wish to associate rather with sensible and well-informed 
persons than with fools and ignorant persons, whether they 
are seen in the company of the sensible ones or not. And 
finally, without being troubled by repetition of any common 
truisms "* about the preciousness of friends, and the influence 
of companions, you will admit, doubtless, that according to 
the sincerity of our desire that our friends may be true, and 
our companions wise, — and in proportion to the earnestness 
and discretion with which we choose both, will be the general 
chances of our happiness and usefulness. 

6. But, granting that we had both the will and the sense 
to choose our friends well, how few of us have the power! or, 
at least, how limited, for most, is the sphere of choice ! Nearly 
all our associations are determined by chance, or necessity; 
and restricted within a narrow circle. We cannot know 
whom we would; and those whom we know, we cannot have 
at our side when we most need them.** All the higher circles 
of human intelligence are, to those beneath, only momentarily 
and partially open. We may, by good fortune, obtain a 
glimpse of a great poet, and hear the sound of his voice; or 
put a question to a man of science, and be answered good- 
humoredly. We may intrude ten minutes' talk on a cabinet 
minister, answered probably with words worse than silence, 
being deceptive; or snatch, once or twice in our lives, the 
privilege of throwing a bouquet in the path of a Princess, or 
arresting the kind glance of a Queen. And yet these momen- 



38 SESAME AND LILIES 

tary chances we covet; and spend our years, and passions, 
and powers in pursuit of little more than these; while, mean- 
time, there is a society " continually open to us, of people 
who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or 
occupation; — talk to us in the best words they can choose, 
and of the things nearest their hearts. And this society, be- 
cause it is so numerous and so gentle, and can be kept wait- 
ing round us all day long, — kings and statesmen lingering 
patiently, not to grant audience, but to gain it! — in those 
plainly furnished and narrow anterooms, our bookcase 
shelves, — we make no account of that company, — perhaps 
never listen to a word they would say, all day long! 

7. You may tell me, perhaps, or think within yourselves, 
that the apathy with which we regard this company of the 
noble, who are praying us to listen to them; and the passion 
with which we pursue the company, probably of the ignoble, 
who despise us, or who have nothing to teach us, are grounded 
in this, — that we can see the faces of the living men, and it 
is themselves, and not their sayings, with which we desire 
to become familiar. But it is not so. Suppose you never were ' 
to see their faces; — suppose you could be put behind a 
screen in the statesman's cabinet, or the prince's chamber, 
would you not be glad to listen to their words, though you 
were forbidden to advance beyond the screen.? And when 
the screen is only a little less, folded in two instead of four, 
and you can be hidden behind the cover of the two boards 
that bind a book, and listen all day long, not to the casual 
talk, but to the studied, determined," chosen addresses of the 
wisest of men; — this station of audience, and honorable 
privy council, you despise! i 

8. But perhaps you will say that it is because the living 
people talk of things that are passing, and are of immediate , 
interest to you, that you desire to hear them. Nay; that | 
cannot be so, for the living people will themselves tell you 
about passing matters, much better in their writings than in 
their careless talk. But I admit that this motive does in- I 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 39 

fluence you, so far as you prefer those rapid and ephemeral ** 
writings to slow and enduring writings — books, properly so 
called. For all books are divisible into two classes, the books 
of the hour, and the books of all time. Mark this distinc- 
tion — it is not one of quality only. It is not merely the 
bad book that does not last, and the good one that does. 
It is a distinction of species. There are good books for the 
hour, and good ones for all time; bad books for the hour, and 
bad ones for all time. I must define the two kinds before I 
go farther." 

9. The good book of the hour, then, — I do not speak of 
the bad ones — is simply the useful or pleasant talk of some 
person whom you cannot otherwise converse with, printed 
for you. Very useful often, telling you what you need to 
know; very pleasant often, as a sensible friend's present talk 
would be. These bright accounts of travels; good-humored 
and witty discussions of question; lively or pathetic story- 
telling in the form of novel; firm fact-telling, by the real 
agents concerned in the events of passing history; — all these 
books of the hour, multiplying among us as education be- 
comes more general, are a peculiar characteristic and pos- 
session of the present age: we ought to be entirely thankful 
for them, and entirely ashamed of ourselves if we make no 
good use of them. But we make the worst possible use, if 
we allow them to usurp the place of true books: for, strictly 
speaking, they are not books at all, but merely letters or 
newspapers in good print. Our friend's letter may be de- 
lightful, or necessary, to-day: whether worth keeping or not, 
is to be considered. The newspaper may be entirely proper 
at breakfast time, but assuredly it is not reading for all day. 
So, though bound up in a volume, the long letter which gives 
you so pleasant an account of the inns, and roads, and weather 
last year at such a place, or which tells you that amusing 
story, or gives you the real circumstances of such and such 
events, however valuable for occasional reference, may not 
be, in the real sense of the word, a "book" at all, nor, in the 



40 SESAME AND LILIES 

real sense, to be *'read." A book is essentially not a talked 
thing, but a written thing; and written, not with the view 
of mere communication, but of permanence. The book of 
talk is printed only because its author cannot speak to thou- 
sands of people at once; if he could, he would — the volume 
is mere multiplication of his voice. You cannot talk to your 
friend in India; if you could, you would; you write instead: 
that is mere conveyance of voice. But a book is written, not 
to multiply the voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to 
perpetuate it. The author has something to say which he per- 
ceives to be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful. So far 
as he knows, no one has yet said it; so far as he knows, no 
one else can say it. He is bound to say it, clearly and melo- 
diously if he may; clearly, at all events. In the sum of his 
life he finds this to be the thing, or group of things, man- 
ifest to him; — this the piece of true knowledge, or sight 
which his share of sunshine and earth has permitted him to 
seize. He would fain set it down for ever; engrave it on 
rock," if he could; saying, "This is the best of me; for the 
rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, and hated, like 
another; my life was as the vapor, and is not; but this I saw 
and knew; this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory." 
That is his "writing"; it is, in his small human way, and with 
whatever degree of true inspiration is in him, his inscription, 
or scripture. That is a "Book." 

lo. Perhaps you think no books were ever so written? 

But, again, I ask you, do you at all believe in honesty, or 
at all in kindness? or do you think there is never any honesty 
or benevolence in wise people? None of us, I hope, are so 
unhappy as to think that. Well, whatever bit of a wise 
man's work is honestly or benevolently done, that bit is his 
book, or his piece of art. ^ It is mixed always with evil frag- 
ments — ill-done, redundant, affected work. But if you read 
rightly, you will easily discover the true bits, and those are 
the book."* 

^ Note this sentence carefully, and compare the Queen of the Air^ § io6. 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 4I 

11. Now books of this kind have been written in all ages 
by their greatest men; — by great leaders, great statesmen, 
and great thinkers. These are all at your choice; and Life is 
short. You have heard as much before; — yet have you 
measured and mapped out this short life and its possibilities.'* 
Do you know, if you read this, that you cannot read that — 
that what you lose to-day you cannot gain to-morrow.? 
Will you go and gossip with your housemaid, or your stable- 
boy, when you may talk with queens and kings; or flatter 
yourselves that it is with any worthy consciousness of your 
own claims to respect, that you jostle with the common crowd 
for entree ** here and audience there, when all the while this 
eternal court is open to you, with its society, wide as the 
world, multitudinous as its days, the chosen, and the mighty, 
of every place and time.? Into that you may enter always; 
in that you may take fellowship and rank according to your 
wish; from that, once entered into it, you can never be out- 
cast but by your own fault; by your aristocracy of compan- 
ionship there, your own inherent aristocracy will be assuredly 
tested, and the motives with which you strive to take high 
place in the society of the living, measured, as to all the truth 
and sincerity that are in them, by the place you desire to take 
in this company of the Dead.'* 

12. *'The place you desire," and the place you fit yourself 
for, I must also say; because, observe, this court of the past 
differs from all living aristocracy in this: — it is open to 
labor and to merit, but to nothing else. No wealth will 
bribe, no name overawe, no artifice deceive, the guardian of 
those Elysian " gates. In the deep sense, no vile or vulgar 
person ever enters there. At the portieres" of that silent 
Faubourg St. Germain," there is but brief question, ''Do you 
deserve to enter? Pass. Do you ask to be the companion 
of nobles.? Make yourself noble, and you shall be. Do you 
long for the conversation of the wise.? Learn to understand 
it, and you shall hear it. But on other terms.? — no. If you 
will not rise to us, we cannot stoop to you. The living lord 



42 SESAME AND LILIES 

may assume courtesy, the living philosopher explain his 
thought to you with considerable pain; but here we neither 
feign nor interpret; you must rise to the level of our thoughts 
if you would be gladdened by them, and share our feelings, 
if you would recognize our presence." 

13. This, then, is what you have to do, and I admit that 
it is much. You must, in a word, love these people, if you 
are to be among them. No ambition is of any use. They 
scorn your ambition. You must love them, and show your 
love in these two following ways. 

I. First, by a true desire to be taught by them, and to 
enter into their thoughts. To enter into theirs, observe; 
not to find your own expressed by them. If the person who 
wrote the book is not wiser than you, you need not read it; 
if he be, he will think differently from you in many respects. 

Very ready we are to say of a book, *'How good this is — 
that's exactly what I think!" But the right feeling is, 
"How strange that is! I never thought of that before, and 
yet I see it is true; or if I do not now, I hope I shall, some 
day." But whether thus submissively or not, at least be 
sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning," not 
to find yours. Judge it afterwards, if you think yourself 
qualified to do so, but ascertain it first. And be sure also, 
if the author is worth anything, that you will not get at his 
meaning all at once; — nay, that at his whole meaning you 
will not for a long time arrive in any wise. Not that he does 
not say what he means, and in strong words too; but he can- 
not say it all; and what is more strange, will not, but in a 
hidden way " and in parables, in order that he may be sure 
you want it. I cannot quite see the reason of this, nor an- 
alyze that cruel reticence in the breasts of wise men which 
makes them always hide their deeper thought. They do 
not give it you by way of help, but of reward; and will make 
themselves sure that you deserve it before they allow you 
to reach it. But it is the same with the physical type of 
wisdom, gold." There seems, to you and me, no reason 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 43 

why the electric forces of the earth should not carry whatever 
there is of gold within it at once to the mountain tops, so 
that kings and people might know that all the gold they 
could get was there; and without any trouble of digging, 
or anxiety, or chance, or waste of time, cut it away, and 
coin as much as they needed. But Nature does not manage 
it so. She puts it in little fissures in the earth, nobody knows 
where: you may dig long and find none; you must dig pain- 
fully to find any. 

14. And it is just the same with men's best wisdom. 
When you come to a good book, you must ask yourself, 
"Am I inclined to work as an Australian miner would? 
Are my pickaxes and shovels in good order, and am I in 
good trim myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, and my 
breath good, and my temper?" And, keeping the figure 
a little longer, even at cost of tiresomeness, for it is a thor- 
oughly useful one, the metal you are in search of being the 
author's mind or meaning, his words are as the rock which 
you have to crush and smelt in order to get at it. And 
your pickaxes are your own care, wit, and learning; your 
smelting furnace is your own thoughtful soul. Do not hope 
to get at any good author's meaning without those tools and 
that fire; often you will need sharpest, finest chiseling, and 
patientest fusing, before you can gather one grain of the 
metal. 

15. And, therefore, first of all, I tell you, earnestly and 
authoritatively (I know " I am right in this), you must get 
into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring 
yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable — nay, letter 
by letter. For though it is only by reason of the opposition 
of letters in the function of signs, to sounds in function of 
signs, that the study of books is called "literature,"" and 
that a man versed in it is called, by the consent of nations, 
a man of letters instead of a man of books, or of words, you 
may yet connect with that accidental nomenclature this 
real fact: — that you might read all the books in the Brit- 



44 SESAME AND LILIES 

ish Museum (if you could live long enough), and remain 
an utterly "illiterate," uneducated person; but that if you 
read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, — that is 
to say, with real accuracy," — you are for evermore in some 
measure an educated person. The entire difference be- 
tween education and non-education (as regards the merely 
intellectual part of it), consists in this accuracy. A well- 
educated gentleman may not know many languages, — may 
not be able to speak any but his own, — may have read very 
few books. But whatever language he knows, he knows pre- 
cisely; whatever word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly; 
above all, he is learned in the peerage of words; knows the 
words of true .descent and ancient blood, at a glance, from 
words of modern canaille; " remembers all their ancestry, 
their intermarriages, distantest relationships, and the extent 
to which they were admitted, and offices they held, among 
the national noblesse " of words at any time, and in any 
country. But an uneducated person may know, by memory, 
many languages, and talk them all, and yet truly know not 
a word of any, — not a word even of his own. An ordinarily 
clever and sensible seaman will be able to make his way 
ashore at most ports; yet he has only to speak a sentence of 
any language to be known for an illiterate person: so also 
the accent, or turn of expression of a single sentence will at 
once mark a scholar. And this is so strongly felt, so conclu- 
sively admitted by educated persons, that a false accent or 
a mistaken syllable is enough, in the parliament of any 
civilized nation, to assign to a man a certain degree of in- 
ferior standing forever. 

i6. And this is right; but it is a pity that the accuracy 
insisted on is not greater, and required to a serious purpose. 
It is right that a false Latin quantity " should excite a smile 
in the House of Commons; but it is wrong that a false English 
meaning should not excite a frown there. Let the accent 
of words be watched; and closely; but let their meaning be 
watched more closely still, and fewer will do the work. A 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 45 

few words well chosen and distinguished, will do work that 
a thousand cannot, when every one is acting, equivocally, 
in the function of another. Yes; and words, if they are not 
watched, will do deadly work sometimes. There are masked 
words droning and skulking about us in Europe just now, — 
(there never were so many, owing to the spread of a shallow, 
blotching, blundering, infectious "information," or rather 
deformation, everywhere, and to the teaching of catechisms 
and phrases at schools instead of human meanings) — there 
are masked words abroad, I say, which nobody understands, 
but which everybody uses, and most people will also fight 
for, live for, or even die for, fancying they mean this, or 
that, or the other, of things dear to them: for such words 
wear chameleon cloaks " — "ground-lion" cloaks, of the color 
of the ground of any man's fancy: on that ground they 
lie in wait, and rend him with a spring from it. There were 
never c^atures of prey so mischievous, never diplomatists 
ig, never poisoners so deadly, as these masked 
ley are the unjust stewards" of all men's ideas: 
fancy or favorite instinct a man most cherishes, 
to his favorite masked word to take care of for 
le word at last comes to have an infinite power over 
|you cannot get at him but by its ministry, 
ind in languages so mongrel in breed as the English, 
there i^ a fatal power of equivocation put into men's hands, 
almost whether they will or no, in being able to use Greek 
or Latin forms for a word when they want it to be awful; 
and Saxon or otherwise common words when they want it to 
be vulgar. What a singular and salutary effect, for instance, 
would be produced on the minds of people who are in the 
habit of taking the Form of the "Word" they live by, for the 
Power of which that word tells them, if we always either 
retained, or refused, the Greek form "biblos," or "biblion," 
as the right expression for "book" — instead of employing 
it only in the one instance in which we wish to give dignity 
to the idea, and translating it into English everywhere else. 




46 SESAME AND LILIES 

How wholesome it would be for many simple persons, if, in 
such places (for instance) as Acts xix, 19, we retained the 
Greek expression, instead of translating it, and they had to 
read, — "Many of them also which used curious arts, brought 
their Bibles together, and burnt them before all men; and 
they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand 
pieces of silver!" Or if, on the other hand, we translated 
where we retain it, and always spoke of ''the Holy Book," 
instead of "Holy Bible," it might come into more heads than 
it does at present that the Word of God, by which the heavens 
were, of old, and by which they are now kept in store,^ cannot 
be made a present of to anybody in morocco binding; nor 
sown on any wayside by help either of steam plow or steam 
press; " but is nevertheless being offered to us daily, and by 
us with contumely refused; and sown in us daily, and by us, 
as instantly as may be, choked." 

18. So, again, consider what effect has been produced on 
the English vulgar " mind by the use of the sonorous Latin 
form "damno," in translating the Greek KaraKpivoi^ when 
people charitably wish to make it forcible; and the substitu- 
tion of the temperate "condemn" " for it, when they choose 
to keep it gentle; and what notable sermons have been 
preached by illiterate clergymen on — "He that believeth 
not shall be damned;" though they would shrink with horror 
from translating Heb. xi, 7, "The saving of his house, by 
which he damned the world," or John viii, lo-ii, "Woman, 
hath no man damned thee? She saith. No man. Lord. Jesus 
answered her. Neither do I damn thee: go and sin no more." 
And divisions in the mind of Europe," which have cost seas 
of blood and in the defense of which the noblest souls of men 
have been cast away in frantic desolation, countless as forest 
leaves — though, in the heart of them, founded on deeper 
causes — have nevertheless been rendered practically pos- 
sible, mainly, by the European adoption of the Greek word 
for a public meeting, "ecclesia," " to give peculiar respect- 

^ 2 Peter iii, 5-7. 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 47 

ability to such meetings, when held for religious purposes; 
and other collateral equivocations, such as the vulgar English 
one of using the word ''priest" as a contraction for "pres- 
byter." 

19. Now, in order to deal with words rightly, this is the 
habit you must form. Nearly every word " in your language 
has been first a word of some other language — of Saxon, 
German, French, Latin, or Greek; (not to speak of eastern 
and primitive dialects). And many words have been all 
these; — that is to say, have been Greek first, Latin next, 
French or German next, and English last: undergoing a cer- 
tain change of sense and use on the lips of each nation; but 
retaining a deep vital meaning which all good scholars feel 
in employing them, even at this day. If you do not know the 
Greek alphabet, learn it; young or old — girl or boy — who- 
ever you may be, if you think of reading seriously (which, of 
course, implies that you have some leisure at command), 
learn your Greek alphabet; then get good dictionaries of all 
these languages, and whenever you are in doubt about a 
word, hunt it down patiently. Read Max Muller's " lectures 
thoroughly, to begin with; and, after that, never let a word 
escape you that looks suspicious. It is severe work; but you 
will find it, even at first, interesting, and at last, endlessly 
amusing. And the general gain to your character, in power 
and precision, will be quite incalculable. 

Mind, this does not imply knowing, or trying to know, 
Greek or Latin, or French. It takes a whole life to learn 
any language perfectly. But you can easily ascertain the 
meanings through which the English word has passed; 
and those which in a good writer's work it must still 
bear. 

20. And now, merely for example's sake, I will, with your 
permission, read a few lines of a true book with you, care- 
fully; and see what will come out of them. I will take a 
book perfectly known to you all. No English words are 
more familiar to us, yet few perhaps have been less read 



48 SESAME AND LILIES 

with sincerity. I will take these few following lines of 
Lycidas^ 

"Last came, and last did go, 
The pilot « of the GaHlean lake. 
Two massy keys » he bore of metals twain, 
(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain,) 
He shook his mitered « locks, and stern bespake. 
How well could I have spared for thee, young swain, 
Enow of such as for their bellies' sake 
Creep,-and intrude, and climb into the fold! « 
Of other care they little reckoning make. 
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, 
And shove away the worthy bidden guest; » 
Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold 
A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else, the least 
That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs! 
What recks it them? » What need they? They are sped; ^ 
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs » 
Grate on their scrannel « pipes of wretched straw; 
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, 
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, 
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread; 
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw 
Daily devours apace, and nothing said." 

Let us think over this passage, and examine its words. 

First, is it not singular to find Milton assigning to St. Peter, 
not only his full episcopal function, but the very types of it 
which Protestants usually refuse most passionately.? His 
"mitered" locks! Milton was no Bishop-lover; " how comes 
St. Peter to be "mitered".? "Two massy keys he bore." 
Is this, then, the power of the keys claimed by the Bishops 
of Rome, and is it acknowledged here by Milton only in a 
poetical license, for the sake of its picturesqueness, that he 
may get tfie gleam of the golden keys to help his effect.? 

Do not think it. Great men do not play stage tricks with" 
doctrines of life and death: only little men do that. Milton 
means what he says; and means it with his might too — is 
going to put the whole strength of his spirit presently into 
the saying of it. For though not a lover of false bishops, he 
was a lover of true ones; and the Lake-pilot is here, in his 
thoughts, the type and head of true episcopal power. For 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 49 

Milton reads that text, "I will give unto thee the keys of the 
kingdom of Heaven'' quite honestly. Puritan though he be, 
he would not blot it out of the book because there have been 
bad bishops; nay, in order to understand him, we must under- 
stand that verse first; it will not do to eye it askance, or 
whisper it under our breath, as if it were a weapon of an 
adverse sect. It is a solemn, universal assertion, deeply to 
be kept in mind by all sects. But perhaps we shall be better 
able to reason on it if we go on a little farther, and come back 
to it. For clearly, this marked insistence on the power of 
the true episcopate is to make us feel more weightily what 
is to be charged against the false claimants of episcopate; 
or generally, against false claimants of power and rank in 
the body of the clergy; they who, "for their bellies' sake, 
creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold." 

21. Do not think Milton uses those three words to fill up 
his verse, as a loose writer would. He needs all the three; — 
specially those three, and no more than those — '* creep," 
and "intrude," and "climb"; no other words would or could 
serve the turn, and no more could be added. For they ex- 
haustively comprehend the three classes, correspondent to 
the three characters, of men who dishonestly seek ecclesias- 
tical power. First, those who "creep'' into the fold; who do 
not care for office, nor name, but for secret influence, and do 
all things occultly and cunningly, consenting to any servility 
of office or conduct, so only that they may intimately dis- 
cern, and unawares direct, the minds of men. Then those 
who "intrude" (thrust, that is) themselves into the fold, 
who by natural insolence of heart, and stout eloquence of 
tongue, and fearlessly perseverant self-assertion, obtain 
hearing and authority with the common crowd. Lastly, 
those who "climb," who, by labor and learning, both stout 
and sound, but selfishly exerted in the cause of their own 
ambition, gain high dignities and authorities, and become 
" lords over the heritage," though not " ensamples to the 
flock." » 



50 SESAME AND LILIES 

22. Now go on: — 

"Of other care they little reckoning make, 
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, 
Blind mouths — " 






I pause again, for this is a strange expression; a broken 
metaphor,'* one might think, careless and unscholarly. 

Not so: its very audacity and pithiness are intended to 
make us look close at the phrase and remember it. Those 
two monosyllables express the precisely accurate contraries 
of right character, in the two great offices of the Church — 
those of bishop and pastor. 

A "Bishop" means "a person who sees." 

A "Pastor" means "a person who feeds." 

The most unbishoply character a man can have is there- 
fore to be Blind. 

The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be 
fed, — to be a Mouth. 

Take the two reverses together, and you have "blind 
mouths." We may advisedly follow out this idea a little. 
Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops 
desiring power more than light. They want authority, not 
outlook. Whereas their real office" is not to rule; though 
it may be vigorously to exhort and rebuke; it is the king's 
office to rule; the bishop's office is to oversee the flock; to 
number it sheep by sheep; to be ready always to give full 
account of it. Now it is clear he cannot give account of 
the souls, if he has not so much as numbered the bodies 
of his flock. The first thing, therefore, that a bishop has 
to do is at least to put himself in a position in which, at any 
moment, he can obtain the history, from childhood, of every 
living soul in his diocese, and of its present state. Down 
in that back street. Bill, and Nancy," knocking each other's 
teeth out! — Does the bishop know all about it? Has he 
his eye upon them.? Has he had his eye upon them? Can 
he circumstantially explain to us how Bill got into the habit 
of beating Nancy about the head? If he cannot, he is no 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 5 1 

bishop, though he had a miter as high as Salisbury steeple; " 
he is no bishop, — he has sought to be at the helm instead 
of the masthead; he has no sight of things. '*Nay," you 
say, "it is not his duty to look after Bill in the back street." 
What! the fat sheep that have full fleeces — you think it 
is only those he should look after, while (go back to your 
Milton) "the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, besides 
what the grim wolf," with privy paw'* (bishops knowing 
nothing about it) "daily devours apace, and nothing said.?" 

"But that's not our idea of a bishop."^ Perhaps not; 
but it was St. Paul's; and it was Milton's. They may be 
right, or we may be; but we must not think we are reading 
either one or the other by putting our meaning into their 
words. 

23. I go on. 

" But, swoln with wind,» and the rank mist they draw." 

This is to meet the vulgar answer that "if the poor are 
not looked after in their bodies, they are in their souls; 
they have spiritual food." 

And Milton says, "They have no such thing as spiritual 
food; they are only swollen with wind." At first you may 
think that is a coarse type, and an obscure one. But again, 
it is a quite literally accurate one. Take up your Latin and 
Greek dictionaries, and find out the meaning of "Spirit." 
It is only a contraction of the Latin word' "breath," and an 
indistinct translation of the Greek word for "wind." The 
same word is used in writing, "The wind bloweth where 
it listeth; " and in writing, "So is every one that is born 
of the Spirit;" ^ born of the breath, that is; for it means the 
breath of God, in soul and body. We have the true sense 
of it in our words "inspiration" and "expire." Now, there 
are two kinds of breath with which the flock may be filled; 
God's breath, and man's. The breath of God is health, 
and Hfe, and peace to them, as the air of heaved is to the 
* Compare the 13th Letter in Time and' Tide.f* 



52 SESAME AND LILIES 

flocks on the hills; but man's breath — the word which he 
calls spiritual, — is disease and contagion to them, as the 
fog of the fen. They rot inwardly with it; they are puffed 
up by it, as a dead body by the vapors of its decomposition. 
This is literally true of all false religious teaching; the first, 
and last, and fatalest sign of it is that "puffing up." Your 
converted children, who teach their parents; your converted 
convicts, who teach honest men; your converted dunces, 
who, having lived in cretinous " stupefaction half their lives, 
suddenly awakening to the fact of there being a God, fancy 
themselves therefore His peculiar people and messengers; 
your sectarians of every species, small and great. Catholic 
or Protestant, of high church or low, in so far as they think 
themselves exclusively in the right and others wrong; and 
preeminently, in every sect, those who hold that men can 
be saved by thinking rightly " instead of doing rightly, by 
word instead of act, and wish instead of work: — these are 
the true fog children — clouds, these, without water; " 
bodies, these, of putrescent vapor and skin, without blood 
or flesh: blown bagpipes for the fiends to pipe with — cor- 
rupt, and corrupting, — "Swollen with wind, and the rank 
mist they draw." 

24. Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting the power 
of the keys, for now we can understand them. Note the 
difference between Milton and Dante " in their interpreta- 
tion of this power: for once, the latter is weaker in thought; 
he supposes both the keys" to be of the gate of heaven; 
one is of gold, the other of silver: they are given by St. Peter 
to the sentinel angel; and it is not easy to determine the 
meaning either of the substances of the three steps of the 
gate, or of the two keys. But Milton makes one, of gold, 
the key of heaven; the other, of iron, the key of the prison 
in which the wicked teachers are to be bound who "have taken 
away the key " of knowledge, yet entered not in themselves." 

We have seen that the duties of bishop and pastor are 
to see, and feed; and, of all who do so, it is said, "He that 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 53 

watereth, shall be watered also himself." " But the reverse 
is truth also. He that watereth not, shall be withered him- 
self; and he that seeth not, shall himself be shut out of 
sight, — shut into the perpetual prison house. And that 
prison opens here, as well as hereafter: he who is to be bound 
in heaven must first be bound on earth. That command to 
the strong angels, of which the rock-apostle " is the image, 
"Take him, and bind him hand and foot," and cast him out," 
issues, in its measure, against the teacher, for every help 
withheld, and for every truth refused, and for every falsehood 
enforced; so that he is more strictly fettered the more he 
fetters, and farther outcast as he more and more misleads, 
till at last the bars of the iron cage close upon him, and as 
"the golden opes, the iron shuts amain." 

25. We have got something out of the lines, I think, and 
much more is yet to be found in them; but we have done 
enough by way of example of the kind of word-by-word 
examination of your author which is rightly called "reading"; 
watching every accent and expression, and putting ourselves 
always in the author's place, annihilating our own person- 
ality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be able assuredly 
to say, "Thus Milton thought," not "Thus / thought, in 
misreading Milton." And by this process you will gradually 
come to attach less weight to your own "Thus I thought" 
at other times. You will begin to perceive that what you 
thought was a matter of no serious importance; " — that 
your thoughts on any subject are not perhaps the clearest 
and wisest that could be arrived at thereupon: — in fact, that 
unless you are a very singular person, you cannot be said to 
have any "thoughts" at all; that you have no materials for 
them, in any serious matters;^ — no right to "think," but 
only to try to learn more of the facts. Nay, most probably 
all your life (unless, as I said, you are a singular person) you 

^Modern "education" for the most part signifies giving people the 
faculty of thinking wrong on every conceivable subject of importance 
to them. 



54 SESAME AND LILIES 

will have no legitimate right to an "opinion" on any busi- 
ness, except that instantly under your hand. What must 
of necessity be done, you can always find out, beyond ques- 
tion, how to do. Have you a house to keep in order, a com- 
modity to sell, a field to plow, a ditch to cleanse.? There 
need be no two opinions about these proceedings; it is at 
your peril if you have not much more than an "opinion" on 
the way to manage such matters. And also, outside of your 
own business, there are one or two subjects on which you are 
bound to have but one opinion. That roguery and lying 
are objectionable, and are instantly to be flogged out of the 
way whenever discovered; — that covetousness and love of 
quarreling are dangerous dispositions even in children, and 
deadly dispositions in men and nations; — that in the end, 
the God of heaven and earth loves active, modest, and kind 
people, and hates idle, proud, greedy, and cruel ones; — on 
these general facts you are bound to have but one, and that a 
very strong, opinion. For the rest, respecting religions, 
governments, sciences, arts, you will find that, on the whole, 
you can know nothing, — ^judge nothing; that the best you 
can do, even though you may be a well-educated person, is to 
be silent, and strive to be wiser every day, and to understand 
a little more of the thoughts of others, which so soon as you 
try to do honestly, you will discover that the thoughts even 
of the wisest are very little more than pertinent questions. 
To put the difficulty into a clear shape, and exhibit to you the 
grounds for indecision, that is all they can generally do for 
you! — and well for them and for us, if indeed they are able 
"to mix the music" with our thoughts, and sadden us with 
heavenly doubts." This writer," from whom I have been 
reading to you, is not among the first or wisest: he sees 
shrewdly as far as he sees, and therefore it is easy to find out 
his full meaning; but with the greater men, you cannot 
fathom their meaning; they do not even wholly measure it 
themselves, — it is so wide. Suppose I had asked you, 
for instance, to seek for Shakespeare's opinion, instead of 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 55 

Milton's, on this matter of church authority, — or for 
Dante's? Have any of you, at this instant, the least idea 
what either thought about it? Have you ever balanced the 
scene with the bishops in Richard HI, against the character 
of Cranmer? the description of St. Francis "and St. Dominic'* 
against that of him who made Vergil wonder " to gaze upon 
him, — "disteso, tanto vilmente, nell' eterno esilio"; or of 
him whom Dante stood beside, " "come '1 frate che confessa 
lo perfido assassin?" ^ Shakespeare and Alighieri ** knew men 
better than most of us, I presume! They were both in the 
midst of the main struggle between the temporal and spiritual 
powers. They had an opinion, we may guess. But where 
is it? Bring it into court! Put Shakespeare's or Dante's 
creed into articles, and send it up for trial by the Ecclesias- 
tical Courts! 

26. You will not be able, I tell you again, for many and 
many a day, to come at the real purposes and teaching of 
these great men; but a very little honest study of them will 
enable you to perceive that what you took for your own 
"judgment" was mere chance prejudice, and drifted, help- 
less, entangled weed of castaway thought: nay, you will see 
that most men's minds are indeed little better than rough 
heath wilderness, neglected and stubborn, partly barren, 
partly overgrown with pestilent brakes, and venomous, wind- 
sown herbage of evil surmise; that the first thing you have 
to do for them, and yourself, is eagerly and scornfully to set 
fire to this; burn all the jungle into wholesome ash-heaps, 
and then plow and sow. All the true literary work be- 
fore you, for life, must begin with obedience to that order, 
"Break up your fallow ground," and sow not among 
thorns.** 

27. n. ^Having then faithfully Hstened to the great 
teachers, that you may enter into their Thoughts, you have 
yet this higher advance to make; — you have to enter into 

^ Inf. xxiii, 125, 126; xix, 49, 50. 
2 Compare § 13 above. 



56 SESAME AND LILIES 

their Hearts. As you go to them first for clear sight, so you 
must stay with them, that you may share at last their just 
and mighty Passion." Passion, or ''sensation." I am not 
afraid of the word; still less of the thing. You have heard 
many outcries against sensation lately; but, I can tell you, 
it is not less sensation we want, but more. The ennobling 
difference between one man and another, — between one 
animal and another, — is precisely in this, that one feels 
more than another. If we were sponges, perhaps sensation 
might not be easily got for us; if we were earthworms, liable 
at every instant to be cut in two by the spade, perhaps too 
much sensation might not be good for us. But, being human 
creatures, it is good for us: nay, we are only human in so 
far as we are sensitive, and our honor is precisely in propor- 
tion to our passion. 

28. You know I said of that great and pure society of the 
Dead," that it would allow "no vain or vulgar" person to 
enter there." What do you think I meant by a "vulgar" 
person? What do you yourselves mean by "vulgarity"? 
You will find it a fruitful subject of thought; but, briefly, the 
essence of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation. Simple 
and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and undevel- 
oped bluntness of body and mind; but in true inbred vul- 
garity, there is a deathful callousness, which, in extremity, 
becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit and crime, 
without fear, without pleasure, without horror, and without 
pity. It is in the blunt hand and the dead heart, in the 
diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, that men become 
vulgar; they are forever vulgar, precisely in proportion as 
they are incapable of sympathy, — of quick understand- 
ing, — of all that, in deep insistence on the common, but 
most accurate term, may be called the "tact" or "touch- 
faculty " of body and soul: that tact which the Mimosa " has 
in trees, which the pure woman has above all creatures; — 
fineness and fullness of sensation, beyond reason; — the guide 
and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason can but determine 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 57 

what is true: — it is the God-given passion of humanity which 
alone can recognize what God has made good. 

29. We come then to that great concourse of the Dead, not 
merely to know from them what is True, but chiefly to feel 
with them what is righteous. Now, to feel with them, we 
must be like them; and none of us can become that without 
pains. As the true knowledge is disciplined and tested 
knowledge, — not the first thought that comes, — so the true 
passion is disciplined and tested passion, — not the first pas- 
sion that comes. The first that come are the vain, the 
false, the treacherous; if you yield to them they will lead you 
wildly and far, in vain pursuit, in hollow enthusiasm, till 
you have no true purpose and no true passion left. Not that 
any feeling possible to humanity is in itself wrong, but only 
wrong when undisciplined. Its nobility is in its force and 
justice; it is wrong when it is weak, and felt for paltry cause. 
There is a mean wonder, as of a child who sees a juggler toss- 
ing golden balls, and this is base, if you will. But do you think 
that the wonder is ignoble, or the sensation less, with which 
every human soul is called to watch the golden balls of heaven 
tossed through the night by the Hand that made them.? 
There is a mean curiosity, as of a child opening a forbidden 
door, or a servant prying into her master's business; — and a 
noble curiosity, questioning, in the front of danger, the source 
of the great river " beyond the sand, — the place of the great 
continents beyond the sea; — a nobler curiosity still, which 
questions of the source of the River of Life," and of the space 
of the Continent of Heaven, — things which "the angels 
desire to look into." " So the anxiety is ignoble, with which 
you linger over the course and catastrophe of an idle tale; 
but do you think the anxiety is less, or greater, with which 
you watch, or ought to watch, the dealings of fate and destiny 
with the life of an agonized nation ? Alas ! it is the narrowness, 
selfishness, minuteness, of your sensation that you have to 
deplore in England at this day; — sensation which spends it- 
self in bouquets and speeches; in revelings and junketings;" 



58 SESAME AND LILIES 

in sham fights and gay puppet shows, while you can look on 
and see noble nations murdered, man by man, without an 
effort " or a tear. 

30. I said "minuteness" and "selfishness" of sensation, 
but it would have been enough to have said "injustice" or 
" unrighteousness " of sensation. For as in nothing is a gentle- 
man better to be discerned from a vulgar person, so in nothing 
is a gentle nation (such nations have been) better to be 
discerned from a mob, than in this, — that their feelings 
are constant and just, results of due contemplation, and of 
equal thought. You can talk a mob into anything; its 
feelings may be — usually are — on the whole generous and 
right; but it has no foundation for them, no hold of them; 
you may tease or tickle it into any, at your pleasure; it thinks 
by infection, for the most part, catching an opinion like a 
cold, and there is nothing so little that it will not roar itself 
wild about, when the fit is on; — nothing so great but it will 
forget in an hour, when the fit is past. But a gentleman's, 
or a gentle nation's, passions are just, measured, and con- 
tinuous. A great nation, for instance, does not spend its 
entire national wits for a couple of months in weighing evi- 
dence of a single ruffian's having done a single murder; and 
for a couple of years see its own children murder each other 
by their thousands or tens of thousands a day, considering 
only what the effect is likely to be on the price of cotton," 
and caring nowise to determine which side of battle is in the 
wrong. Neither does a great nation send its poor little 
boys to jail for stealing six walnuts; and allow its bankrupts 
to steal their hundreds or thousands with a bow, and its 
bankers, rich with poor men's savings, to close their doors 
"under circumstances over which they have no control," 
with a "by your leave"; and large landed estates to be bought 
by men who have made their money by going with armed 
steamers up and down the China Seas, selling opium at 
the cannon's mouth, ** and altering, for the benefit of the 
foreign nation, the common highwayman's demand of "your 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 59 

money or your life," into that of "your money and your life." 
Neither does a great nation allow the lives of its innocent 
poor to be parched out of them by fog fever, and rotted 
out of them by dunghill plague, for the sake of sixpence a 
life extra per week to its landlords; ^ and then debate, with 
driveling tears, and diabolical sympathies, whether it ought 
not piously to save, and nursingly cherish, the lives of its 
murderers. Also, a great nation having made up its mind 
that hanging is quite the wholesomest process for its homi- 
cides in general, can yet with mercy distinguish between the 
degrees of guilt in homicides; and does not yelp like a pack 
of frost-pinched wolf cubs on the blood-track of an unhappy 
crazed boy, or gray-haired clodpate Othello, "perplex'd i' 
the extreme," " at the very moment that it is sending a 
Minister of the Crown to make polite speeches to a man who 
is bayoneting young girls " in their father's sight, and killing 
noble youths in cool blood, faster than a country butcher 
kills lambs in spring. And, lastly, a great nation does not 
mock Heaven and its Powers, by pretending belief in a revela- 
tion which asserts the love of money " to be the root of all 
evil, and declaring, at the same time, that it is actuated, 
and intends to be actuated, in all chief national deeds and 
measures, by no other love. 

31. My friends, I do not know why any of us should talk 
about reading. We want some sharper discipline than that of 
reading; but, at all events, be assured, we cannot read. No 
reading is possible for a people with its mind in this state. 
No sentence of any great writer is intelligible to them." 
It is simply and sternly impossible for the English public, 
at this moment, to understand any thoughtful writing, — so 
incapable of thought has it become in its insanity of avarice. 
Happily, our disease is, as yet, little worse than this in- 
capacity of thought; it is not corruption of the inner nature; 
we ring true still, when anything strikes home to us; and 
though the idea that everything should "pay" has infected 
^ See note at end of lecture. 



6o SESAME AND LILIES 

our every purpose so deeply, that even when we would play 
the good Samaritan," we never take out our two pence and 
give them to the host, without saying, "When I come again, 
thou shalt give me fourpence," there is a capacity of noble 
passion left in our hearts' core. We show it in our work — 
in our war, — even in those unjust domestic affections which 
make us furious at a small private wrong, while we are polite 
to a boundless public one: we are still industrious to the 
last hour of the day, though we add the gambler's fury to 
the laborer's patience; we are still brave to the death, though 
incapable of discerning true cause for battle; and are still 
true in affection to our own flesh, to the death, as the sea 
monsters are, and the rock eagles. And there is hope for a 
nation while this can be still said of it. As long as it holds its 
life in its hand, ready to give it for its honor (though a foolish 
honor), for its love (though a selfish love), and for its business 
(though a base business), there is hope for it. But hope 
only; for this instinctive, reckless virtue cannot last. No 
nation can last, which has made a mob of itself, however 
generous at heart. It must discipline its passions, and direct 
them, or they will discipline it, one day, with scorpion whips." 
Above all, a nation cannot last as a money-making mob:" 
it cannot with impunity, — it cannot with existence, — go 
on despising literature, despising science, despising art, 
despising nature, despising compassion, and concentrating 
its soul on Pence. Do you think these are harsh or wild 
words.? Have patience with me but a little longer. I will 
prove their truth to you, clause by clause. 

32. I. I say first we have despised literature. What do 
we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think 
we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as 
compared with what we spend on our horses.? If a man 
spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad — a biblio- 
maniac." But you never call anyone a horse-maniac, though 
men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do 
not hear of people ruining themselves by their books. Or, to 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 6l 

go lower still, how much do you think the contents of the 
bookshelves of the United Kingdom, public and private, 
would fetch, as compared with the contents of its wine 
cellars? What position would its expenditure on literature 
take, as compared with its expenditure on luxurious eating? 
We talk of food for the mind, as of food for the body: now a 
good book contains such food inexhaustibly; it is a provi- 
sion for life, and for the best part of us; yet how long most 
people would look at the best book before they would give 
the price of a large turbot for it! Though there have been 
men who have pinched their stomachs and bared their backs 
to buy a book, whose libraries were cheaper to them, I 
think, in the end, than most men's dinners are. We are few 
of us put to such trial, and more the pity; for, indeed, a 
precious thing is all the more precious to us if it has been 
won by work or economy; and if public libraries were half 
as costly as public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of 
what bracelets do, even foolish men and women might some- 
times suspect there was good in reading, as well as in munch- 
ing and sparkling; whereas the very cheapness of literature 
is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth read- 
ing, it is worth buying. No book is worth anything which 
is not worth much; nor is it serviceable, until it has been 
read, and reread, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so 
that you can refer to the passages you want in it, as a soldier 
can seize the weapon he needs in an armory, or a housewife 
bring the spice she needs from her store. Bread of flour is 
good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, 
in a good book; and the family must be poor indeed which, 
once in their lives, cannot, for such multipliable barley 
loaves," pay their baker's bill. We call ourselves a rich 
nation, and we are filthy and foolish enough to thumb each 
other's books out of circulating libraries! " 

33. II. I say we have despised science. *'What!" (you 
exclaim) "are we not foremost in all discovery,^ and is not 

^ Since this was written, the answer has become definitely — No; we hav- 



62 SESAME AND LILIES 

the whole world giddy by reason, or unreason, of our inven- 
tions?" Yes; but do you suppose that is national work? 
That work is all done in spite of the nation; by private 
people's zeal and money. We are glad enough, indeed, to 
make our profit of science; we snap up anything in the way 
of a scientific bone that has meat on it, eagerly enough; but 
if the scientific man comes for a bone or a crust to wj, that is 
another story. What have we publicly done for science? 
We are obliged to know what o'clock it is, for the safety of 
our ships, and therefore we pay for an observatory; " and 
we allow ourselves, in the person of our Parliament, to be 
annually tormented into doing something, in a slovenly 
way, for the British Museum; suddenly apprehending that 
to be a place for keeping stuffed birds in, to amuse our chil- 
dren. If anybody will pay for their" own telescope, and 
resolve another nebula, we cackle over the discernment as 
if it were our own; if one in ten thousand of our hunting 
squires suddenly perceives that the earth was indeed made 
to be something else than a portion for foxes," and burrows 
in it himself, and tells us where the gold is, and where the 
coals, we understand that there is some use in that; and very 
properly knight him: but is the accident of his having found 
out how to employ himself usefully any credit to us? (The 
negation of such discovery among his brother squires may 
perhaps be some ^wcredit to us, if we would consider of 
it.) But if you doubt these generalities, here is one fact for 
us all to meditate upon, illustrative of our love of science." 
Two years ago there was a collection of the fossils of Solen- 
hofen to be sold in Bavaria; the best in existence, contain- 
ing many specimens unique for perfectness, and one, unique 
as an example of a species (a whole kingdom of unknown 
living creatures being announced by that fossil). This col- 
lection, of which the mere market worth, among private 
buyers, would probably have been some thousand or twelve 

ing surrendered the field of Arctic discovery to the Continental nations, as 
being ourselves too poor to pay for ships'. 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 63 

hundred pounds, was offered to the English nation for seven 
hundred: but we would not give seven hundred, and the 
whole series would have been in the Munich museum at 
this nioment, if Professor Owen ^ had not with loss of his 
own time, and patient tormenting of the British public in 
person of its representatives, got leave to give four hundred 
pounds at once, and himself become answerable for the 
other three! which the said public will doubtless pay him 
eventually, but sulkily, and caring nothing about the matter 
all the while; only always ready to cackle if any credit comes 
of it. Consider, I beg of you, arithmetically, what this 
fact means. Your annual expenditure for public purposes 
(a third of it for military apparatus) is at least 50 millions. 
Now 700/. is to 50,000,000/. roughly, as seven pence to two 
thousand pounds. Suppose then, a gentleman of unknown 
income, but whose wealth was to be conjectured from the fact 
that he spent two thousand a year on his park walls and foot- 
men only, professes himself fond of science; and that one of his 
servants comes eagerly to tell him that an unique collection 
of fossils, giving clue to a new era of creation, is to be had for 
the sum of seven pence sterling; and that the gentleman who 
i is fond of science, and spends two thousand a year on his park, 
answers, after keeping his servant waiting several months, 
"Well! ril give you four pence for them, if you will be an- 
swerable for the extra three pence yourself, till next year!" 
'34. III. I say you have despised art! "What!" you 
again answer, "have we not Art exhibitions, miles long.? 
and do we not pay thousands of pounds for single pictures? 
and have we not Art schools and institutions, more than ever 
nation had before?" Yes, truly, but all that is for the sake 
of the shop. You would fain sell canvas as well as coals, and 
crockery as well as iron; you would take every other nation's 

^ I state this fact without Professor Owen's « permission: which of course 
he could not with propriety have granted, had I asked it; but I consider 
It so important that the public should be aware of the fact, that I do what 
seems to me right, though rude. 



64 SESAME AND LILIES 

bread out of its mouth if you could; ^ not being able to do 
that, your ideal of life is to stand in the thoroughfares of 
the world, like Ludgate apprentices," screaming to every 
passer-by, "What d'ye lack?" You know nothing of your 
own faculties or circumstances; you fancy that, among 
your damp, flat, fat fields of clay, you can have as quick art- 
fancy as the Frenchman among his bronzed vines, or the 
ItaHan under his volcanic cliflFs; — that art may be learned 
as bookkeeping is, and when learned, will give you more 
books to keep. You care for pictures, absolutely," no more 
than you do for the bills pasted on your dead walls. There 
is always room on the wall for the bills to be read, — never 
for the pictures to be seen. You do not know what pictures 
you have (by repute) in the country, nor whether they are 
false or true, nor whether they are taken care of or not; in 
foreign countries, you calmly see the noblest existing pic- 
tures in the world rotting in abandoned wreck — (in Venice 
you saw the Austrian guns " deliberately pointed at the 
palaces containing them), and if you heard that all the 
fine pictures in Europe were made into sandbags to-morrow 
on the Austrian forts, it would not trouble you so much as the 
chance of a brace or two of game less in your own bags in a 
day's shooting. That is your national love of Art." 

35. IV. You have despised nature; that is to say, all the 
deep and sacred sensations of natural scenery. The French 
revolutionists made stables of the cathedrals of France; 
you have made race courses of the cathedrals of the earth. 
Your one conception of pleasure is to drive in railroad car- 
riages round their aisles, and eat off" their altars.^ You 
have put a railroad bridge over the fall of SchaffTiausen." 

^That was our real Idea of "Free Trade" — "All the trade to myself." 
You find now that by "competition" other people can manage to sell some- 
thing as well as you — and now we call for Protection again. Wretches! 

2 I meant that the beautiful places of the world — Switzerland, Italy, 
South Germany, and so on — are, indeed, the truest cathedrals — places to 
be reverent in, and to worship in; and that we only care to drive through 
them; and to eat and drink at their most sacred places. 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 65 

You have tunneled the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell's chapel; 
you have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva; 
there is not a quiet valley in England that you have not 
filled with bellowing fire; there is no particle left of English 
land which you have not trampled coal ashes into ^ — nor any 
foreign city in which the spread of your presence is not 
marked among its fair old streets and happy gardens by a 
consuming white leprosy of new hotels and perfumers' shops: 
the Alps themselves, which your own poets " used to love 
so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a bear garden, 
which you set yourselves to climb, and slide down again, 
with "shrieks of delight." When you are past shrieking, 
having no human articulate voice to say you are glad with, 
you fill the quietude of their valleys with gunpowder blasts, 
and rush home, red with cutaneous eruption of conceit, and 
voluble with convulsive hiccough of self-satisfaction. I think 
nearly the two sorrowfullest spectacles I have ever seen in hu- 
manity, taking the deep inner significance of them, are the 
English mobs in the valley of Chamonix, amusing themselves 
with firing rusty howitzers; and the Swiss vintagers of Zurich 
expressing their Christian thanks for the gift of the vine, by 
assembling in knots in the "towers of the vineyards," " and 
slowly loading and firing horse pistols from morning till even- 
ing. It is pitiful, to have dim conceptions of duty; more piti- 
ful, it seems to me, to have conceptions like these, of mirth. 

36. Lastly. You despise compassion. There is no need 
of words of mine for proof of this. I will merely print one 
of the newspaper paragraphs which I am in the nabit of 
cutting out and throwing into my store-drawer; here is one 
from a Daily Telegraph of an early date this year (1864); 
(date which though by me carelessly left unmarked, is easily 
discoverable, for on the back of the slip, there is the announce- 
ment that "yesterday the seventh of the special services 

^ I was singularly struck, some years ago, by finding all the river shore at 
Richmond, in Yorkshire, black in its earth, from the mere drift of soot-laden 
air from places many miles away. 



66 SESAME AND LILIES 

of this year was performed by the Bishop of Ripon in 
St. Paul's"); it relates only one of such facts as happen now 
daily; this, by chance, having taken a form in which it came 
before the coroner. I will print the paragraph in red. " Be 
sure, the facts themselves are written in that color, in a book 
which we shall all of us, literate or illiterate, have to read 
our page of, some day. 

"An inquiry was held on Friday by Mr. Richards, deputy 
coroner, at the White Horse Tavern, Christ Church, Spital- 
fields," respecting the death of Michael Collins, aged 58 
years. Mary Collins, a miserable-looking woman, said 
that she lived with the deceased and his son in a room at 2, 
Cobb's court, Christ Church. Deceased was a * translator' 
of boots. Witness went out and bought old boots; deceased 
and his son made them into good ones, and then witness 
sold them for what she could get at the shops, which was 
very little indeed. Deceased and his son used to work night 
and day to try and get a little bread and tea, and pay for 
the room {zs. a week), so as to keep the home together. On 
Friday night week deceased got up from his bench, and 
began to shiver. He threw down the boots, saying, * Some- 
body else must finish them when I am gone, for I can do no 
more.' There was no fire, and he said, 'I would be better if 
I was warm.' Witness therefore took two pairs of translated 
boots ^ to sell at the shop, but she could only get 14^. for 
the two pairs, for the people at the shop said, * We must have 
our profit.' Witness got 141b. of coal, and a little tea and 
bread. Her son sat up the whole night to make the 'trans- 
lations,' to get money, but deceased died on Saturday morn- 
ing. The family never had enough to eat. — Coroner: *It 
seems to me deplorable that you did not go into the work- 
house.' — Witness: 'We wanted the comforts of our little 
home.' A juror asked what the comforts were, for he only 

^ One of the things which we must very resolutely enforce, for the good 
of all classes, in our future arrangements, must be that they wear no "trans- 
lated" articles of dress.« See the Preface. 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 67 

saw a little straw in the corner of the room, the windows of 
which were broken. The witness began to cry, and said 
that they had a quilt and other little things. The deceased 
said he never would go into the workhouse. In summer, 
when the season was good, they sometimes made as much as 
IOJ-." profit in the week. They then always saved towards 
the next week, which was generally a bad one. In winter 
they made not half so much. For three years they had 
been getting from bad to worse. — Cornelius Collins said that 
he had assisted his father since 1847. They used to work 
so far into the night that both nearly lost their eyesight. 
Witness now had a film over his eyes. Five years ago de- 
ceased applied to the parish for aid. The relieving officer 
gave him a 41b. loaf, and told him if he came again he should 
*get the stones.' ^ « That disgusted deceased, and he would 
have nothing to do with them since. They got worse and 
worse until last Friday week, when they had not even a half- 
penny to buy a candle. Deceased then lay down on the 

1 This abbreviation of the penalty of useless labor is curiously coincident 
in verbal form with a certain passage " which some of us may remember. 
It may perhaps be well to preserve beside this paragraph another cutting 
out of my store-drawer, from the Morning Post, of about a parallel date, 

Friday, March loth, 1865: — "The salons of Mme. C , who did the 

honors with clever imitative grace and elegance, were crowded with princes, 
dukes, marquises, and counts — in fact, with the same male company as 
one meets at the parties of the "Princess Metternich and Madame Drouyn 
de Lhuys. Some English peers and members of Parliament were present, 
and appeared to enjoy the animated and dazzlingly improper scene. On 
the second floor the supper tables were loaded with every delicacy of the 
season. That your readers may form some idea of the dainty fare of the; 
Parisian demimonde, I copy the menu of the supper, which was served to 
all the guests (about 200) seated at four o'clock. Choice Yquem, Johannis- 
berg, Laffitte, Tokay, and champagne of the finest vintages were served 
most lavishly throughout the morning. After supper dancing was resumed 
with increased animation, and the ball terminated with a chain diabolique 
and a cancan d'enfer at seven in the morning. (Morning service — ' Ere the 
fresh lawns appeared, under the opening eyelids of the Morn. — ') Here 
is the menu: — ' ConsommS de volatile a la Bagration; 16 hors-d'oeuvres varies. 
Bouchees a la Talleyrand. Saumons froids, sauce Ravigote. Filets de basuf en 
Bellevue, timbales milanaises chaudfroid de gibier. Dindes truffles. Pdtis de 
foies gras, buissons d'ecrevisses, salades v^netiennes, gelees blanches aux fruits, 
gateaux manciniy parisiens et parisiennes. Frontages, glacis. Ananas. Dessert.'" 



68 SESAME AND LILIES 

straw, and said he could not live till morning. — A juror: 
*You are dying of starvation yourself, and you ought to go 
into the house'* until the summer.' — Witness: 'If we went 
in we should die. When we came out in the summer we 
should be like people dropped from the sky. No one would 
know us, and we would not have even a room. I could 
work now if I had food, for my sight would get better.' Dr. 
G. P. Walker said deceased died from syncope, from exhaus- 
tion from want of food. The deceased had had no bed 
clothes. For four months he had had nothing but bread to 
eat. There was not a particle of fat in the body. There was 
no disease, but if there had been medical attendance, he 
might have survived the syncope or fainting. The coroner 
having remarked upon the painful nature of the case, the 
jury returned the following verdict, 'That deceased died 
from exhaustion from want of food and the common neces- 
saries of life; also through want of medical aid.'" 

37. "Why would witness not go into the workhouse?" 
you ask. Well, the poor seem to have a prejudice against 
the workhouse which the rich have not; for of course every 
one who takes a pension from government goes into the work- 
house on a grand scale: ^ only the workhouses for the rich do 
not involve the idea of work, and should be called playhouses. 
But the poor like to die independently, it appears; perhaps if 
we made the playhouses for them pretty and pleasant enough, 
or gave them their pensions at home, and allowed them a 
little introductory peculation with the public money, their 
minds might be reconciled to it. Meantime, here are the 
facts: we make our relief either so insulting to them, or so 
painful, that they rather die than take it at our hands; or, 
for third alternative, we leave them so untaught and foolish 
that they starve like brute creatures, wild and dumb, not 
knowing what to do, or what to ask. I say, you despise 

^ Please observe this statement, and think of it, and consider how it hap- 
pens that a poor old woman will be ashamed to take a shilling a week from 
the country — but no one is ashamed to take a pension of a thousand a year. 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 69 

compassion; if you did not, such a newspaper paragraph 
would be as impossible in a Christian country as a deliberate 
assassination permitted in its public streets.^ ''Christian," 
did I say? Alas, if we were but wholesomely w«-Christian, 
it would be impossible: it is our imaginary Christianity that 
helps us to commit these crimes, for we revel and luxuriate 
in our faith, for the lewd sensation of it; dressing it up, like 
everything else, in fiction. The dramatic Christianity of 
the organ and aisle, of dawn-service and twilight revival — 
the Christianity which we do not fear to mix the mockery of, 
pictorially, with our play about the devil, in our Satanellas, — 
Roberts, — Fausts;'^ chanting hymns through traceried win- 

1 1 am heartily glad to see such a paper as the Pall Mall Gazette estabUshed; 
for the power of the press in the hands of highly-educated men, in inde- 
pendent position, and of honest purpose, may indeed become all that it has 
been hitherto vainly vaunted to be. Its editor will therefore, I doubt not, 
pardon me, in that, by very reason of my respect for the journal, I do not 
let pass unnoticed an article in its third number, page 5, which was wrong 
in every word of it, with the intense wrongness which only an honest man 
can achieve who has taken a false turn of thought in the outset, and is fol- 
lowing it, regardless of consequences. It contained at the end this notable 
passage: — 

"The bread of affliction, and the water of affliction — aye, and the bed- 
steads and blankets of affliction, are the very utmost that the law ought 
to give to outcasts merely as outcasts." I merely put beside this expression 
of the gentlemanly mind of England in 1865, a part of the message which 
Isaiah was ordered to "lift up his voice like a trumpet" in declaring to the 
gentlemen of his day: "Ye fast for strife, and to smite with the fist of 
wickedness. Is not this the fast that I have chosen, to deal thy bread to 
the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out (margin 'afflicted') 
to thy house." The falsehood on which the writer had mentally founded 
himself, as previously stated by him, was this: "To confound the functions 
of the dispensers of the poor-rates with those of the dispensers of a charitable 
institution is a great and pernicious error." This sentence is so accurately 
and exquisitely wrong, that its substance must be thus reversed in our 
minds before we can deal with any existing problem of national distress. 
"To understand that the dispensers of the poor-rates are the almoners of 
the nation, and should distribute its alms with a gentleness and freedom of 
hand as much greater and franker than that possible to individual charity, 
as the collective national wisdom and power may be supposed greater than 
those of any single person, is the foundation of all law respecting pauperism." 
Since this was written the Pall Mall Gazette has become a mere party paper 
— like the rest; but it writes well, and does more good than mischief on the 
whole. 



70 SESJME AND LILIES 

dows for background effect, and artistically modulating 
the "Dio"" through variation on variation of mimicked 
prayer: (while we distribute tracts, next day, for the benefit 
of uncultivated swearers, upon what we suppose to be the 
signification of the Third Commandment;) — this gas-lighted, 
and gas-inspired, Christianity, we are triumphant in, and 
draw back the hem of our robes from the touch of the heretics 
who dispute it. But to do a piece of common Christian 
righteousness in a plain English word or deed;" to make 
Christian law any rule of life, and found one national act or 
hope thereon, — we know too well what our faith comes to 
for that! You might sooner get lightning out of incense 
smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English 
religion. You had better get rid of the smoke, and the organ 
pipes, both: leave them, and the Gothic windows, and the 
painted glass, to the property man; " give up your carbureted 
hydrogen ghost in one healthy expiration, and look after Laz- 
arus " at the doorstep. For there is a true church wherever 
one hand meets another helpfully, and that is the only holy 
or Mother Church which ever was, or ever shall be. 

38. All these pleasures then, and all these virtues, I repeat, 
you nationally despise. You have, indeed, men among you 
who do not; by whose work, by whose strength, by whose 
life, by whose death, you live, and never thank them." Your 
wealth, your amusement, your pride, would all be alike im- 
possible, but for those whom you scorn or forget. The police- 
man, who is walking up and down the black lane all night to 
watch the guilt you have created there; and may have his 
brains beaten out, and be maimed for life at any moment, 
and never be thanked; the sailor wrestling with the sea's 
rage; the quiet student poring over his book or his vial; the 
common worker, without praise, and nearly without bread, 
fulfilling his task as your horses drag your carts, hopeless, 
and spurned of all: these are the men by whom England lives; 
but they are not the nation; they are only the body and ner- 
vous force of it, acting still from old habit in convulsive 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 71 

perseverance, while the mind is gone. Our National wish and 
purpose are only to be amused; our National religion is the 
performance of church ceremonies, and preaching of soporific 
truths (or untruths) to keep the mob quietly at work, while 
we amuse ourselves; and the necessity for this amusement 
is fastening on us, as a feverous disease of parched throat and 
wandering eyes — senseless, dissolute, merciless. How liter- 
ally that word Du-Ease, the Negation and impossibility of 
Ease, expresses the entire moral state of our English indus- 
try and its Amusements! 

39. When men are rightly occupied, their amusement 
grows out of their work, as the color petals out of a fruitful 
flower; — when they are faithfully helpful and compassion- 
ate, all their emotions become steady, deep, perpetual, and 
vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to the body. But 
now, having no true business, we pour our whole masculine 
energy into the false business of money-making; and having 
no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed up 
for us to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, but 
guiltily and darkly, as the idolatrous Jews" with their pictures 
on cavern walls, which men had to dig to detect. The justice 
we do not execute, we mimic in the novel and on the stage; 
for the beauty we destroy in nature, we substitute the meta- 
morphosis of the pantomime, and (the human nature of us im- 
peratively requiring awe and sorrow of some kind) for the no- 
ble grief we should have borne with our fellows, and the pure 
tears we should have wept with them, we gloat over the pathos 
of the police court, and gather the night dew of the grave. 

40. It is difficult to estimate the true significance of these 
things; the facts are frightful enough; — the measure of 
national fault involved in them is perhaps not as great as it 
would at first seem. We permit, or cause, thousands of 
deaths daily, but we mean no harm; we set fire to houses, 
and ravage peasants' fields, yet we should be sorry to find 
we had injured anybody. We are still kind at heart; still 
capable of virtue, but only as children are. Chalmers," at 



72 SESAME AND LILIES 

the end of his long life, having had much power with the 
public, being plagued in some serious matter by a reference 
to ''public opinion," uttered the impatient exclamation, 
"The public is just a great baby!" " And the reason that I 
have allowed all these graver subjects of thought to mix 
themselves up with an inquiry into methods of reading, is 
that, the more I see of our national faults or miseries, the 
more they resolve themselves into conditions of childish 
illiterateness, and want of education in the most ordinary 
habits of thought. It is, I repeat, not vice, not selfishness, 
not dullness of brain, which we have to lament; but an un- 
reachable schoolboy's recklessness, only differing from the 
true schoolboy's in its incapacity of being helped, because 
it acknowledges no master. 

41. There is a curious type of us given in one of the lovely, 
neglected works of the last of our great painters." It is a 
drawing of Kirkby Lonsdale " churchyard, and of its brook, 
and valley, and hills, and folded morning sky beyond. And 
unmindful alike of these, and of the dead who have left these 
for other valleys and for other skies, a group of schoolboys 
have piled their little books upon a grave, to strike them off 
with stones. So, also, we play with the words of the dead that 
would teach us, and strike them far from us with our bitter, 
reckless will; little thinking that those leaves which the wind 
scatters had been piled, not only upon a gravestone, but upon 
the seal of an enchanted vault — nay, the gate of a great 
city of sleeping kings, who would awake for us, and walk 
with us, if we knew but how to call them by their names. 
How often, even if we lift the marble entrance gate, do we 
but wander among those old kings in their repose, and finger 
the robes they lie in, and stir the crowns on their foreheads; 
and still they are silent to us, and seem but a dusty imagery; 
because we know not the incantation of the heart that would 
wake them; — which, if they once heard, they would start 
up to meet us in their power of long ago, narrowly to look 
upon us, and consider us; and, as the fallen kings of Hades 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 73 

meet the newly fallen, saying, "Art thou also become weak 
as we — art thou also become one of us?" so would these 
kings, with their undimmed, unshaken diadems, meet us, 
saying, "Art thou also become pure and mighty of heart as 
we? art thou also become one of us?" " 

42. Mighty of heart, mighty of mind — " magnanimous " " — 
to be this, is indeed to be great in life; to become this 
increasingly, is, indeed, to "advance in life," " — in life itself — 
not in the trappings of it. My friends, do you remember 
that old Scythian custom, when the head of a house died? 
How he was dressed in his finest dress, and set in his chariot, 
and carried about to his friends' houses; and each of them 
placed him at his table's head, and all feasted in his presence? 
Suppose it were offered to you, in plain words, as it is offered 
to you in dire facts, that you should gain this Scythian honor," 
gradually, while you yet thought yourself alive. Suppose the 
offer were this: You shall die slowly; your blood shall daily 
grow cold, your flesh petrify, your heart beat at last only as 
a rusted group of iron valves. Your life shall fade from you, 
and sink through the earth into the ice of Caina; " but, day 
by day, your body shall be dressed more gayly, and set in 
higher chariots, and have more orders on its breast — crowns 
on its head, if you will. Men shall bow before it, stare and 
shout round it, crowd after it up and down the streets; build 
palaces for it, feast with it at their tables' heads all the night 
long; your soul shall stay enough within it to know what 
they do, and feel the weight of the golden dress on its shoul- 
ders, and the furrow of the crown-edge on the skull; — no 
more. Would you take the offer, verbally made by the death 
angel? Would the meanest among us take it, think you? 
Yet practically and verily we grasp at it, every one of us, in 
a measure; many of us grasp at it in its fullness of horror. 
Every man accepts it, who desires to advance in life without 
knowing what life is; who means only that he is to get more 
horses, and more footmen, and more fortune, and more public 
honor, and — not more personal soul. He only is advancing 



74 SESAME AND LILIES 

in life, whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, 
whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into Living ^ 
peace. And the men who have this life in them are the true 
lords or kings of the earth — they, and they only. All other 
kingships, so far as they are true, are only the practical issue 
and expression of theirs; if less than this, they are either 
dramatic royalties, — costly shows, set off, indeed, with real 
jewels instead of tinsel — the toys of nations; or else, they are 
no royalties at all, but tyrannies, or the mere active and 
practical issue of national folly; for which reason I have said 
of them elsewhere," "Visible governments are the toys of 
some nations, the diseases of others, the harness of some, the 
burdens of more." 

43. But I have no words for the wonder with which I hear 
kinghood still spoken of, even among thoughtful men, as if 
governed nations were a personal property, and might be 
bought and sold, or otherwise acquired, as sheep, of whose 
flesh their king was to feed, and whose fleece he was to gather; 
as if Achilles' indignant epithet of base kings, "people- 
eating," " were the constant and proper title of all monarchs; 
and enlargement of a king's dominion meant the same thing 
as the increase of a private man's estate! Kings who think 
so, however powerful, can no more be the true kings of the 
nation than gadflies are the kings of a horse; they suck it, and 
may drive it wild, but do not guide it. They, and their courts, 
and their armies are, if one could see clearly, only a large 
species of marsh mosquito, with bayonet proboscis and melo- 
dious, band-mastered, trumpeting in the summer air; the 
twilight being, perhaps, sometimes fairer, but hardly more 
wholesome, for its glittering mists of midge companies. 
The true kings," meanwhile, rule quietly, if at all, and hate 
ruling; too many of them make "il gran rifiuto"; " and if 
they do not, the mob, as soon as they are likely to become 
useful to it, is pretty sure to make its "gran rifiuto" of them. 

44. Yet the visible king may also be a true one, some day, 

^ " t6 S^ (pp6v7]fxa ToO Trvei/jLaTos fwr; kuI e i py v tj." » 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 75 

if ever day comes when he will estimate his dominion by the 
force of it, — not the geographical boundaries. It matters 
very little whether Trent " cuts you a cantel ** out here, or 
Rhine rounds you a castle less there. But it does matter to 
you, king of men, whether you can verily say to this man, 
"Go," and he goeth; and to another, "Come,"** and he 
cometh. Whether you can turn your people as you can 
Trent — and where it is that you bid them come, and where 
go. It matters to you, king of men, whether your people 
hate you, and die by you, or love you, and live by you. You 
may measure your dominion by multitudes, better than by 
miles; and count degrees of love-latitude, not from, but to, a 
wonderfully warm and infinite equator. 

45. Measure! nay, you cannot measure. Who shall meas- 
ure the difference between the power of those who "do and 
teach," " and who are greatest in the kingdoms of earth, as 
of heaven — and the power of those who undo, and con- 
sume — whose power, at the fullest, is only the power of the 
moth and the rust? " Strange! to think how the Moth-kings 
lay up treasures for the moth, and the Rust-kings, who are 
to their people's strength as rust to armor, lay up treasures 
for the rust; and the Robber-kings, treasures for the robber; 
but how few kings have ever laid up treasures that needed 
no guarding — treasures of which, the more thieves there 
were, the better! Broidered robe, only to be rent; helm 
and sword, only to be dimmed; jewel and gold, only to be 
scattered; — there have been three kinds of kings who have 
gathered these. Suppose there ever should arise a Fourth 
order of kings, who had read, in some obscure writing of long 
ago, that there was a Fourth kind of treasure," which the jewel 
and gold could not equal, neither should it be valued with 
pure gold. A web more fair in the weaving, by Athena's 
shuttle; an armor, forged in divine fire by Vulcanian force — 
a gold to be mined in the very sun's red heart, where he 
sets over the Delphian cliffs;" — deep-pictured tissue; — im- 
penetrable armor; — potable gold; — the three great Angels of 



-^e SESAME AND LILIES 

Conduct, Toil, and Thought, still calling to us, and waiting 
at the posts of our doors, to lead us, if we would, with their 
winged power, and guide us, with their unerring eyes, by 
the path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's 
eye has not seen! Suppose kings should ever arise, who 
heard and believed this word, and at last gathered and 
brought forth treasures of — Wisdom — for their people? 

46. Think what an amazing business that would be! How 
inconceivable, in the state of our present national wisdom! 
That we should bring up our peasants to a book exercise 
instead of a bayonet exercise!** — organize, drill, maintain 
with pay, and good generalship, armies of thinkers, instead 
of armies of stabbers! — find national amusement in reading 
rooms as well as rifle grounds; give prizes for a fair shot at a 
fact, as well as for a leaden splash on a target. What an 
absurd idea, it seems, put fairly in words, that the wealth 
of the capitalists of civilized nations should ever come to 
support literature instead of war! 

47, Have yet patience with me, while I read you a single 
sentence out of the only book," properly to be called a 
book, that I have yet written myself, the one that will 
stand (if anything stand) surest and longest of all work of 
mine. 

"It is one very awful form of the operation of wealth in 
Europe that it is entirely capitalists' wealth which supports 
unjust wars. Just wars do not need so much money to sup- 
port them; for most of the men who wage such, wage them 
gratis; but for an unjust war, men's bodies and souls have 
both to be bought; and the best tools of war for them besides, 
which makes such war costly to the maximum; not to speak 
of the cost of base fear, and angry suspicion, between nations 
which have not grace nor honesty enough in all their mul- 
titudes to buy an hour's peace of mind with; as, at present 
France and England, purchasing of each other ten millions' 
sterling worth of consternation, annually (a remarkably 
light crop, half thorns and half aspen leaves, sown, reaped, 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 77 

and granaried by the * science' of the modern political econ- 
omist, teaching covetousness instead of truth). And, all 
unjust war being supportable, if not by pillage of the enemy, 
only by loans from capitalists, these loans are repaid by 
subsequent taxation of the people, who appear to have no 
will in the matter, the capitalists' will being the primary root 
of the war; but its real root is the covetousness of the whole 
nation, rendering it incapable of faith, frankness, or justice, 
and bringing about, therefore, in due time, his own separate 
loss and punishment to each person." 

48. France and England literally, observe, buy panic of 
each other; they pay, each of them, for ten thousand thou- 
sand pounds' worth of terror, a year." Now suppose, instead 
of buying these ten millions' worth of panic annually, they 
made up their minds to be at peace with each other, and buy 
ten millions' worth of knowledge annually; and that each 
nation spent its ten thousand thousand pounds a year in 
founding royal libraries, royal art galleries, royal museums, 
royal gardens, and places of rest. Might it not be better 
somewhat for both French and English? 

49. It will be long, yet, before that comes to pass. Never- 
theless, I hope it will not be long before royal or national 
Hbraries will be founded in every considerable city, with a 
royal series of books in them; the same series in every one 
of them, chosen books, the best in every kind, prepared for 
that national series in the most perfect way possible; their 
text printed all on leaves of equal size, broad of margin, and 
divided into pleasant volumes, light in the hand, beautiful, 
and strong, and thorough as examples of binders' work; and 
that these great libraries will be accessible to all clean and 
orderly persons at all times of the day and evening; strict 
law being enforced for this cleanliness and quietness. 

50. I could shape for you other plans, for art galleries, and 
for natural history galleries, and for many precious — many, 
it seems to me, needful — things; but this book plan is the 
easiest and needfullest, and would prove a considerable tonic 



78 SESAME AND LILIES 

to what we call our British Constitution, which has fallen 
dropsical of late, and has an evil thirst, and evil hunger, and 
wants healthier feeding. You have got its corn laws repealed 
for it; try if you cannot get corn laws established for it, 
dealing in a better bread;— bread made of that old en- 
chanted Arabian grain, the Sesame, which opens doors; — 
doors, not of robbers'," but of Kings' Treasuries. 



Note to § 30 



Respecting the increase of rent by the deaths of the poor, 
for evidence of which, see the evidence in the Medical Offi- 
cer's report to the Privy Council, just published. There 
are suggestions in its preface which will make some stir 
among us, I fancy, respecting which let me note these points 
following: — 

There are two theories on the subject of land now abroad, 
and in contention; both false. 

The first is that by heavenly law, there have always existed, 
and must continue to exist, a certain number of hereditarily 
sacred persons, to whom the earth, air, and water of the world 
belong, as personal property; of which earth, air, and water 
these persons may, at their pleasure, permit, or forbid, the 
rest of the human race to eat, to breathe, or to drink. This 
theory is not for many years longer tenable. The adverse 
theory is that a division of the land of the world among the 
mob of the world would immediately elevate the said mob 
into sacred personages; that houses would then build them- 
selves, and corn grow of itself; and that everybody would be 
able to live, without doing any work for his living. This 
theory would also be found highly untenable in practice. 

It will, however, require some rough experiments, and 
rougher catastrophes, even in this magnesium-lighted epoch, 
before the generality of persons will be convinced that no 
law concerning anything, least of all concerning land, for 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES 79 

either holding or dividing it, or renting it high, or renting it 
low, would be of the smallest ultimate use to the people, so 
long as the general contest for life, and for the means of life, 
remains one of mere brutal competition. That contest, in an 
unprincipled nation, will take one deadly form or another, 
whatever laws you make for it. For instance, it would be an 
entirely wholesome law for England, if it could be carried, 
that maximum limits should be assigned to incomes, accord- 
ing to classes; and that every nobleman's income should be 
paid to him as a fixed salary or pension by the nation; and 
not squeezed by him in a variable sum, at discretion, out of 
the tenants of his land. But if you could get such a law passed 
to-morrow, and if, which would be further necessary, you 
could fix the value of the assigned incomes by making a given 
weight of pure bread for a given sum, a twelvemonth would 
not pass before another currency would have been tacitly 
established, and the power of accumulated wealth would have 
reasserted itself in some other article, or some imaginary sign. 
There is only one cure for public distress — and that is public 
education, directed to make men thoughtful, merciful, and 
just. There are, indeed, many laws conceivable which would 
gradually better and strengthen the national temper; but, for 
the most part, they are such as the national temper must be 
much bettered before it would bear. A nation in its youth 
may be helped by laws, as a weak child by backboards, but 
when it is old it cannot that way straighten its crooked 
spine." 

And besides the problem of land, at its worst, is a bye one; 
distribute the earth as you will, the principal question re- 
mains inexorable, — Who is to dig it? Which of us, in brief 
words, is to do the hard and dirty work for the rest — and 
for what pay? Who is to do the pleasant and clean work, 
and for what pay ? Who is to do no work, and for what pay ? 
And there are curious moral and religious questions connected 
with these. How far is it lawful to suck a portion of the soul 
out of a great many persons, in order to put the abstracted 



8o SESAME AND LILIES 

psychical quantities together and make one very beautiful 
or ideal soul? If we had to deal with mere blood, instead of 
spirit, (and the thing might literally be done — as it has been 
done with infants before now) — so that it were possible, by 
taking a certain quantity of blood from the arms of a given 
number of the mob, and putting it all into one person, to 
make a more azure-blooded gentleman of him, the thing 
would of course be managed; but secretly, I should conceive. 
But now, because it is brain and soul that we abstract, not 
visible blood, it can be done quite openly, and we live, we 
gentlemen, on delicatest prey, after the manner of weasels; 
that is to say, we keep a certain number of clowns " digging 
and ditching, and generally stupefied, in order that we, being 
fed gratis, may have all the thinking and feeling to ourselves. 
Yet there is a great deal to be said for this. A highly-bred 
and trained English, French, Austrian, or Italian gentle- 
man (much more a lady), is a great production; a better pro- 
duction than most statues; being beautifully colored as well 
as shaped, and plus all the brains; a glorious thing to look at, 
a wonderful thing to talk to; and you cannot have it, any 
more than a pyramid or a church, but by sacrifice of much 
contributed life." And it is, perhaps, better to build a beauti- 
ful human creature than a beautiful dome or steeple — and 
more delightful to look up reverently to a creature far above 
us, than to a wall; only the beautiful human creature will 
have some duties to do in return — duties of living belfry 
and rampart — of which presently. 



LECTURE II— LILIES 

OF queens' gardens 

"Be thou glad, oh thirsting Desert; let the desert be made cheer- 
ful and bloom as the lily; and the barren places of Jordan shall run 
wild with wood." — Isaiah xxxv: i. (Septuagint.) " 

51. It will, perhaps, be well, as this Lecture is the sequel 
of one previously given, that I should shortly state to you 
my general intention in both. The questions specially pro- 
posed to you in the first,** namely. How and What to Read, 
rose out of a far deeper one, which it was my endeavor to 
make you propose earnestly to yourselves, namely, Why to 
Read. I want you to feel, with me, that whatever advan- 
tage we possess in the present day in the diffusion of educa- 
tion and of literature, can only be rightly used by any of us 
when we have apprehended clearly what education is to lead 
to, and literature to teach. I wish you to see that both well- 
directed moral training and well-chosen reading lead to the 
possession of a power over the ill-guided and illiterate, which 
is, according to the measure of it, in the truest sense, kingly; " 
conferring indeed the purest kingship that can exist among 
men: too many other kingships (however distinguished by 
visible insignia or material power) being either spectral, or 
tyrannous; — spectral — that is to say, aspects and shadows 
only of royalty, hollow as death, and which only the "like- 
ness of a kingly crown " have on," or else tyrannous — that 
is to say, substituting their own will for the law of justice 
and love by which all true kings rule. ^ 

52. There is, then, I repeat — and as I want to leave this 
idea with you, I begin with it, and shall end with it — only 



82 SESAME AND LILIES 

one pure kind of kingship; " an inevitable and eternal kind, 
crowned or not: the kingship, namely, which consists in a 
stronger moral state, and a truer thoughtful state, than that 
of others; enabling you, therefore, to guide, or to raise them. 
Observe that word "State"; we have got into a loose way of 
using it. It means literally the standing and stability of a 
thing; and you have the full force of it in the derived word 
"statue" — "the immovable thing." A king's majesty or 
"state," then, and the right of his kingdom to be called a 
state, depends on the movelessness of both: — without tremor, 
without quiver of balance; established and enthroned upon 
a foundation of eternal law which nothing can alter, nor 
overthrow. 

53. Believing that all literature and all education are only 
useful so far as they tend to confirm this calm, beneficent, 
and therefore kingly, power — first, over ourselves, and, 
through ourselves, over all around us, I am now going to ask 
you to consider with me, farther, what special portion or 
kind of this royal authority, arising out of noble education, 
may rightly be possessed by women; and how far they also 
are called to a true queenly power. Not in their households 
merely, but over all within their sphere." And in what 
sense, if they rightly understood and exercised this royal or 
gracious influence, the order and beauty induced by such 
benignant power would justify us in speaking of the terri- 
tories over which each of them reigned, as "Queens' Gar- 
dens." 

54. And here, in the very outset," we are met by a far 
deeper question, which — strange though this may seem — 
remains among many of us yet quite undecided, in spite of 
its infinite importance. 

We cannot determine what the queenly power of women 
should be, until we are agreed what their ordinary power 
should be. We cannot consider how education may fit them 
for any widely extending duty, until we are agreed what is 
their true constant duty. And there never was a time when 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS 83 

wilder words were spoken, or more vain imagination per- 
mitted, respecting this question — quite vital to all social 
happiness. The relations of the womanly to the manly 
nature, their different capacities of intellect or of virtue, 
seem never to have been yet measured with entire consent. 
We hear of the "mission" and of the "rights" of Woman, 
as if these could ever be separate from the mission and the 
rights of Man; — as if she and her lord were creatures of 
independent kind and of irreconcilable claim. This, at least, 
is wrong. And not less wrong — perhaps even more foolishly 
wrong (for I will anticipate thus far what I hope to prove) — 
is the idea that woman is only the shadow and attendant 
image of her lord, owing him a thoughtless and servile obedi- 
ence, and supported altogether in her weakness by the pre- 
eminence of his fortitude. 

This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors respecting her 
who was made to be the helpmate of man. As if he could be 
helped effectively by a shadow, or worthily by a slave! ^ 

55. Let us try, then, whether we cannot get at some clear 
and harmonious idea (it must be harmonious if it is true) 
of what womanly mind and virtue are in power and office, 
with respect to man's; and how their relations, rightly ac- 
cepted, aid, and increase, the vigor, and honor, and authority 
of both. 

And now I must repeat " one thing I said in the last lecture: 
namely, that the first use of education was to enable us to 
consult with the wisest and the greatest men on all points 
of earnest difficulty. That to use books rightly, was to go to 
them for help: to appeal to them, when our knowledge and 
power of thought failed; to be led by them into wider sight, — 
purer conception, — than our own, and receive from them the 
united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against 
our solitary and unstable opinion. 

Let us do this now. Let us see whether the greatest, the 
wisest, the purest-hearted of all ages are agreed in any wise 
on this point: let us hear the testimony they have left respect- 



84 SESAME AND LILIES 

ing what they held to be the true dignity of woman, and her 
mode of help to man. 

56. And first let us take Shakespeare. 

Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has no heroes,^ — 
he has only heroines. There is not one entirely heroic figure 
in all his plays, except the slight sketch of Henry the Fifth, 
exaggerated for the purposes of the stage; and the still 
slighter Valentine in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In his 
labored and perfect plays you have no hero. Othello would 
have been one, if his simplicity had not been so great as to 
leave him the prey of every base practice round him; but he 
is the only example even approximating to the heroic type. 
Coriolanus — Caesar — Antony, stand in flawed strength, and 
fall by their vanities; — Hamlet is indolent, and drowsily 
speculative; Romeo an impatient boy; the Merchant of 
Venice languidly submissive to adverse fortune; Kent, in 
King Lear, is entirely noble at heart, but too rough and un- 
polished to be of true use at the critical time, and he sinks 
into the ofliice of a servant only. Orlando, no less noble, is 
yet the despairing toy of chance, followed, comforted, saved, 
by Rosalind. Whereas there is hardly a play that has not a 
perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope, and errorless 
purpose; Cordelia," Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, 
Queen Katherine, Perdita, Silvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, 
and last, and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless; 
conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity. 

57. Then observe, secondly. 

The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly 
or fault of a man; the redemption, if there be any, is by the 
wisdom and virtue of a woman, and, failing that, there is 
none. The catastrophe of King Lear is owing to his own 
want of judgment, his impatient vanity, his misunderstand- 
ing of his children; the virtue of his one true daughter would 
have saved him from all the injuries of the others, unless he 
had cast her away from him; as it is, she all but saves him. 

Of Othello I need not trace the tale; — nor the one weak- 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS 85 

ness of his so mighty love; nor the inferiority of his percep- 
tive intellect to that even of the second woman character 
in the play, the Emilia who dies in wild testimony against 
his error: — 

"Oh, murderous coxcomb! What should such a fool 
Do with so good a wife? " 

In Romeo and Juliet, the wise and entirely brave stratagem 
of the wife is brought to ruinous issue by the reckless im- 
patience of her husband. In Winter's Tale, and in Cymbe- 
line, the happiness and existence of two princely households, 
lost through long years, and imperiled to the death by the 
folly of the husbands, are redeemed at last by the queenly 
patience and wisdom of the wives. In Measure for Measure, 
the injustice of the judge, and the corrupt cowardice of the 
brother, are opposed to the victorious truth and adamantine 
purity of a woman. In Coriolanus, the mother's counsel, 
acted upon in time, would have saved her son from all evil; 
his momentary forgetfulness of it is his ruin; her prayer, at 
last granted, saves him — not, indeed, from death, but from 
the curse of living as the destroyer of his country. 

And what shall I say of Julia, constant against the fickle- 
ness of a lover who is a mere wicked child.? — of Helena, 
against the petulance and insult of a careless youth.? — of the 
patience of Hero, the passion of Beatrice, and the calmly 
devoted wisdom of the ''unlessoned girl," who appears 
among the helplessness, the blindness, and the vindictive 
passions of men, as a gentle angel, bringing courage and 
safety by her presence, and defeating the worst malignities 
of crime by what women are fancied most to fail in, — preci- 
sion and accuracy of thought. 

58. Observe, further, among all the principal figures in 
Shakespeare's plays, there is only one weak woman — Ophelia; 
and it is because she fails Hamlet at the critical moment, and 
is not, and cannot in her nature be, a guide to him when he 
needs her most, that all the bitter catastrophe follows. 



86 SESAME AND LILIES 

Finally, though there are three wicked women among the 
principal figures, Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril, they 
are felt at once to be frightful exceptions to the ordinary laws 
of life; fatal in their influence also in proportion to the power 
for good which they have abandoned. 

Such, in broad light, is Shakespeare's testimony to the 
position and character of women in human life. He repre- 
sents them as infallibly faithful and wise counselors, — in- 
corruptibly just and pure examples — strong always to sanc- 
tify even when they cannot save. 

59. Not as in any wise comparable in knowledge of the 
nature of man, — still less in his understanding of the causes 
and courses of fatej'^^^^but only as the writer who has given 
us the broadest view of the conditions and modes of ordinary 
thought in modern society, I ask you next to receive the 
witness of Walter Scott. 

I put aside his merely romantic prose writings as of no 
value," and though the early romantic poetry is very beauti- 
ful, its testimony is of no weight, other than that of a boy's 
ideal. But his true works, studied from Scottish life, bear a 
true witness; and in the whole range of these there are but 
three men who reach the heroic type ^ — Dandie Dinmont," 
Rob Roy, and Claverhouse: of these, one is a border farmer; 
another a freebooter; the third a soldier in a bad cause. And 
these touch the ideal of heroism only in their courage and 
faith, together with a strong, but uncultivated, or mistakenly 
applied, intellectual power; while his younger men are the 
gentlemanly playthings of fantastic fortune, and only by aid 
(or accident) of that fortune, survive, not vanquish, the trials 

* I ought, in order to make this assertion fully understood, to have noted 
the various weaknesses which lower the ideal of other great characters of 
men in the Waverley novels — the selfishness and narrowness of thought in 
Redgauntlet, the weak religious enthusiasm in Edward Glendenning, and 
the Hke; and I ought to have noticed that there are several quite perfect 
characters sketched sometimes in the backgrounds; three — let us accept 
joyously this courtesy to England and her soldiers — are English officers: 
Colonel Gardiner, Colonel Talbot, and Colonel Mannering. 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS 87 

they involuntarily sustain. Of any disciplined, or consistent 
character, earnest in a purpose wisely conceived, or dealing 
with forms of hostile evil, definitely challenged, and resolutely 
subdued, there is no trace in his conceptions of young men. 
Whereas in his imaginations of women, — in the characters 
of Ellen Douglas, of Flora Maclvor, Rose Bradwardine, 
Catherine Seyton, Diana Vernon, Lilias Redgauntlet, Alice 
Bridgenorth, Alice Lee, and Jeanie Deans, — with endless 
varieties of grace, tenderness, and intellectual power, we 
find in all a quite infallible sense of dignity and justice; a 
fearless, instant, and untiring self-sacrifice to even the appear- 
ance of duty, much more to its real claims; and, finally, a 
patient wisdom of deeply restrained affection, which does in- 
finitely more than protect its objects from a momentary error; 
it gradually forms, animates, and exalts the characters of the 
unworthy lovers, until, at the close of the tale, we are just 
able and no more, to take patience in hearing of their un- 
merited success. 

So that in all cases, with Scott as with Shakespeare, it is 
the woman who watches over, teaches, and guides the youth; 
it is never, by any chance, the youth who watches over, or 
educates, his mistress. 

60. Next, take, though more briefly, graver testimony — 
that of the great Italians and Greeks. You know well the 
plan of Dante's great poem — that it is a love poem to his 
dead lady;" a song of praise for her watch over his soul. 
Stooping only to pity, never to love, she yet saves him from 
destruction — saves him from hell. He is going eternally 
astray in despair; she comes down from heaven to his help, 
and throughout the ascents of Paradise is his teacher, inter- 
preting for him the most difficult truths, divine and human, 
and leading him, with rebuke upon rebuke, from star to star. 

I do not insist upon Dante's conception; if I began I could 
not cease: besides, you might think this a wild imagination 
of one poet's heart. So I will rather read to you a few verses 
of the deliberate writing of a knight of Pisa ^ to his living 



88 SESAME AND LILIES 

lady, wholly characteristic of the feeling of all the noblest 
men of the thirteenth, or early fourteenth, century, pre- 
served among many other such records of knightly honor and 
love, which Dante Rossetti " has gathered for us from among 
the early Italian poets. 

"For lo! thy law is passed 
That this my love should manifestly be 

To serve and honor thee: 
And so I do; and my delight is full, 
Accepted for the servant of thy rule. 
Without almost, I am all rapturous. 

Since thus my will was set 
To serve, thou flower of joy, thine excellence: 
Nor ever seems it anything could rouse 

A pain or a regret. 
But on thee dwells mine every thought and sense; 
Considering that from thee all virtues spread 

As from a fountain head, — 
That in thy gift is wisdom's best avails 

And honor without fail; 
With whom each sovereign good dwells separate, 
Fulfilling the perfection of thy state. 

"Lady, since I conceived 
Thy pleasurable aspect in my heart. 

My life has been apart 
In shining brightness and the place of truth; 

Which till that time, good sooth, 
Groped among shadows in a darkened place, 

Where many hours and days 
It hardly ever had remember'd good. 

But now my servitude 
Is thine, and I am full of joy and rest. 

A man from a wild beast 
Thou madest me, since for thy love I lived." 

6i. You may think, perhaps, a Greek knight would have 
had a lower estimate of women than this Christian lover. 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS 8^ 

His spiritual subjection to them was indeed not so absolute; 
but as regards their own personal character, it was only 
because you could not have followed me so easily, that I did 
not take the Greek women instead of Shakespeare's; and 
instance, for chief ideal types of human beauty and faith, the 
simple mother's and wife's heart of Andromache; " the divine, 
yet rejected wisdom of Cassandra; the playful kindness and 
simple princess-life of happy Nausicaa; the housewifely calm 
of that of Penelope, with its watch upon the sea; the ever 
patient, fearless, hopelessly devoted piety of the sister, and 
daughter, in Antigone; the bowing down of Iphigenia, lamb- 
like and silent; and, finally, the expectation of the resur- 
rection, made clear to the soul of the Greeks in the return 
from her grave of that Alcestis, who, to save her husband, 
had passed calmly through the bitterness of death. 

62. Now I could multiply witness upon witness of this 
kind upon you if I had time. I would take Chaucer," and 
show you why he wrote a Legend of Good Women; but no 
Legend of Good Men. I would take Spenser," and show you 
how all his fairy knights are sometimes deceived and some- 
times vanquished; but the soul of Una is never darkened, 
and the spear of Britomart is never broken. Nay, I could 
go back into the mythical teaching of the most ancient times, 
and show you how the great people, — by one of whose prin- 
cesses it was appointed that the Lawgiver of all the earth " 
should be educated, rather than by his own kindred; — how 
that great Egyptian people, wisest then of nations, gave to 
their Spirit of Wisdom the form of a woman; and into her 
hand, for a symbol, the weaver's shuttle: and how the name 
and the form of that spirit, adopted, believed, and obeyed 
by the Greeks, became that Athena " of the olive-helm, and 
cloudy shield, to faith in whom you owe, down to this date, 
whatever you hold most precious in art, in literature, or in 
types of national virtue. 

63. But I will not wander into this distant and mythical 
element; I will only ask you to give its legitimate value to 



90 SESAME AND LILIES 

the testimony of these great poets and men of the world, — 
consistent, as you see it is, on this head. I will ask you 
whether it can be supposed that these men, in the main 
work of their lives, are amusing themselves with a fictitious 
and idle view of the relations between man and woman; — 
nay, worse than fictitious or idle; for a thing may be imagi- 
nary, yet desirable, if it were possible; but this, their ideal of 
women, is, according to our common idea of the marriage 
relation, wholly undesirable. The woman, we say, is not to 
guide, nor even to think, for herself. The man is always to 
be the wiser; he is to be the thinker, the ruler, the superior 
in knowledge and discretion, as in power. 

64. Is it not somewhat important to make up our minds on 
this matter? Are all these great men mistaken, or are we. f* Are 
Shakespeare and ^schylus, Dante and Homer, merely dress- 
ing dolls for us; or, worse than dolls, unnatural visions, the 
realization of which, were it possible, would bring anarchy 
into all households and ruin into all affections ? Nay, if you 
can suppose this, take lastly the evidence of facts, given by 
the human heart itself. In all Christian ages which have 
been remarkable for their purity or progress, there has been 
absolute yielding of obedient devotion, by the lover, to his 
mistress. I say obedient; — not merely enthusiastic and 
worshiping in imagination, but entirely subject, receiving 
from the beloved woman, however young, not only the en- 
couragement, the praise, and the reward of all toil, but, so 
far as any choice is open, or any question difficult of decision, 
the direction of all toil. That chivalry, to the abuse and dis- 
honor of which are attributable primarily whatever is cruel 
in war, unjust in peace, or corrupt and ignoble in domestic re- 
lations; and to the original purity and power of which we owe 
the defense alike of faith, of law, and of love; — that chivalry, 
I say, in its very first conception of honorable life, assumes 
the subjection of the young knight to the command — should 
it even be the command in caprice — of his lady. It assumes 
this, because its masters knew that the first and necessary 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS 91 

impulse of every truly taught and knightly heart is this of 
blind service to its lady: that where that true faith and cap- 
tivity are not, all wayward and wicked passion must be; 
and that in this rapturous obedience to the single love of his 
youth, is the sanctification of all man's strength, and the con- 
tinuance of all his purposes. And this, not because such 
obedience would be safe, or honorable, were it ever rendered 
to the unworthy; but because it ought to be impossible for 
every noble youth — it is impossible for everyone rightly 
trained — to love anyone whose gentle counsel he cannot 
trust, or whose prayerful command he can hesitate to 
obey. 

65. I do not insist by any farther argument on this, for I 
think it should commend itself at once to your knowledge of 
what has been and to your feeling of what should be. You 
cannot think that the buckling on of the knight's armor by 
his lady's hand was a mere caprice of romantic fashion. It is 
the type of an eternal truth — that the soul's armor is never 
well set to the heart unless a woman's hand has braced it; 
and it is only when she braces it loosely that the honor of 
manhood fails. Know you not those lovely lines — I would 
they were learned by all youthful ladies of England: — 

"Ah wasteful woman! — she who may 
On her sweet self set her own price, 
Knowing he cannot choose but pay — 
How has she cheapen'd Paradise! 
How given for nought her priceless gift, 
How spoiled the bread and spill'd the wine, 
Which, spent with due, respective thrift. 
Had made brutes men, and men divine!" * 

66. Thus much, then, respecting the relations of lovers 
I believe you will accept. But what we too often doubt is the 

^ Coventry Patmore.» You cannot read him too often or too carefully; 
as far as I know he is the only living poet who always strengthens and 
purifies; the others sometimes darken, and nearly always depress and dis- 
courage, the imagination they deeply seize. 



92 SESAME AND LILIES 

fitness of the continuance of such a relation throughout the 
whole of human life. We think it right in the lover and mis- 
tress, not in the husband and wife. That is to say, we think 
that a reverent and tender duty is due to one whose affection 
we still doubt, and whose character we as yet do but partially 
and distantly discern; and that this reverence and duty are 
to be withdrawn, when the affection has become wholly and 
limitlessly our own, and the character has been so sifted and 
tried that we fear not to intrust it with the happiness of our 
lives. Do you not see how ignoble this is, as well as how 
unreasonable? Do you not feel that marriage, — when it is 
marriage at all, — is only the seal which marks the vowed 
transition of temporary into untiring service, and of fitful 
into eternal love? 

67. But how, you will ask, is the idea of this guiding func- 
tion of the woman reconcilable with a true wifely subjection? 
Simply in that it is a guiding, not a determining," function. 
Let me try to show you briefly how these powers seem to be 
rightly distinguishable. 

We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of 
the "superiority" of one sex to the other, as if they could be 
compared in similar things. Each has what the other has 
not: each completes the other, and is completed by the 
other: they are in nothing alike, and the happiness and per- 
fection of both depend on each asking and receiving from the 
other what the other only can give. 

68. Now their separate characters are briefly these. The 
man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is emi- 
nently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. 
His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for 
adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, 
wherever conquest necessary. But the woman's power is for 
rule, not for battle, — and her intellect is not for invention 
or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and deci- 
sion. She sees the qualities of things, their claims, and their 
places. Her great function is Praise: she enters into no con- 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS 93 

test, but infallibly judges the crown of contest. By her 
office, and place, she is protected from all danger and temp- 
tation. The man, in his rough work in open world, must 
encounter all peril and trial: — to him, therefore, must be 
the failure, the offense, the inevitable error: often he must 
be wounded," or subdued; often misled; and always hardened. 
But he guards the woman from all this; within his house, as 
ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter no 
danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offense. This is 
the true nature of home" — it is the place of Peace; the shelter, 
not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and divi- 
sion. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the 
anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the incon- 
sistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of 
the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross 
the threshold, it ceases to be home; it is then only a part of 
that outer world which you have roofed over, and lighted 
fire in. But so far as it is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a 
temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods, be- 
fore whose faces none may come but those whom they can re- 
ceive with love, — so far as it is this, and roof and fire are types 
only of a nobler shade and light, — shade as of the rock " in a 
weary land, and light as of the Pharos in the stormy sea; — 
so far it vindicates the name, and fulfills the praise, of 
Home. 

And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round 
her. The stars only may be over her head; the glowworm in 
the night-cold grass may be the only fire at her foot: but 
home is yet wherever she is; and for a noble woman it 
stretches far round her, better than ceiled with cedar," or 
painted with vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, for those 
who else were homeless. 

69. This, then, I believe to be, — will you not admit it to 
be.? — the woman's true place and power? But do not you see 
that to fulfill this, she must — as far as one can use such terms 
of a human creature — be incapable of error.? " So far as she 



94 SESAME AND LILIES 

rules, all must be right, or nothing is. She must be endur- 
ingly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise — wise, 
not for self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not 
that she may set herself above her husband, but that she may 
never fail from his side: wise, not with the narrowness of in- 
solent and loveless pride, but with the passionate gentleness 
of an infinitely variable, because infinitely appHcable, mod- 
esty of service — the true changefulness of woman. In that 
great sense — "La donna e mobile,"" not ''Qual piilm' al 
vento"; no, nor yet "Variable as the shade, by the light 
quivering aspen made'*; but variable as the light, manifold 
in fair and serene division, that it may take the color of all 
that it falls upon, and exalt it. 

70. 11. I have been trying, thus far, to show you what 
should be the place, and what the power, of woman. Now, 
secondly, we ask. What kind of education is to fit her for 
these } 

And if you indeed think this a true conception of her office 
and dignity, it will not be difficult to trace the course of edu- 
cation which would fit her for the one, and raise her to the 
other. 

The first of our duties to her — no thoughtful persons now 
doubt this, — is to secure for her such physical training and 
exercise as may confirm her health, and perfect her beauty; 
the highest refinement of that beauty being unattainable 
without splendor of activity and of delicate strength. To 
perfect her beauty, I say, and increase its power; it cannot 
be too powerful, nor shed its sacred light too far: only re- 
member that all physical freedom is vain to produce beauty 
without a corresponding freedom of heart. There are two 
passages of that poet " who is distinguished, it seems to me, 
from all others — not by power, but by exquisite Tightness — 
which point you to the source, and describe to you, in a few 
syllables, the completion of womanly beauty. I will read the 
introductory stanzas, but the last is the one I wish you 
specially to notice: 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS 95 

"Three years she grew in sun and shower, 
Then Nature said, *A loveHer flower 

On earth was never sown. 
This child I to myself will take; 
She shall be mine, and I will make 
A lady of my own. 

"^Myself will to my darling be 

Both law and impulse; and with me 

The girl, in rock and plain, 
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 
Shall feel an overseeing power 

To kindle, or restrain. 

"'The floating clouds their state shall lend 
To her, for her the willow bend; 

Nor shall she fail to see 
Even in the motions of the storm, 
Grace that shall mold the maiden's form 

By silent sympathy. 

"' And vital feelings of delight 

Shall rear her form to stately height,— 

Her virgin bosom swell. 
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give. 
While she and I together live, 

Here in this happy dell.'" 1 

''Vital feelings of delight," observe. There are deadly 
feelings of delight; but the natural ones are vital, necessary 
to very life. 

And they must be feelings of delight, if they are to be 
vital. Do not think you can make a girl lovely, if you do 
not make her happy. There is not one restraint you put on 
a good girl's nature — there is not one check " you give to her 
instincts of affection or eflPort — which will not be indelibly 
written on her features, with a hardness which is all the more 

^Observe, it is "Nature" who is speaking throughout, and who says, 
"while she and I together live." 



96 SESJME AND LILIES 

painful because it takes away the brightness from the eyes 
of innocence, and the charm from the brow of virtue. 

71. This for the means: now note the end. Take from the 
same poet, in two Hnes, a perfect description of womanly 
beauty — 

"A countenance " in which did meet 
Sweet records, promises as sweet." 

The perfect loveliness of a woman's countenance can only 
consist in that majestic peace, which is founded in the memory 
of happy and useful years, — full of sweet records; and from 
the joining of this with that yet more majestic childishness, 
which is still full of change and promise; — opening always — 
modest at once, and bright, with hope of better things to be 
won, and to be bestowed. There is no old age where there 
is still that promise. 

72. Thus, then, you have first to mold her physical 
frame, and then, as the strength she gains will permit you, 
to fill and temper her mind with all knowledge and thoughts 
which tend to confirm its natural instincts of justice, and 
refine its natural tact of love. 

All such knowledge should be given her as may enable 
her to understand, and even to aid, the work of men: and yet 
it should be given, not as knowledge, — not as if it were, or 
could be, for her an object to know; but only to feel, and to 
judge. It is of no moment, as a matter of pride or perfect- 
ness in herself, whether she knows many languages or one; 
but it is of the utmost, that she should be able to show kind- 
ness to a stranger, and to understand the sweetness of a 
stranger's tongue. It is of no moment to her own worth or 
dignity that she should be acquainted with this science or 
that; but it is of the highest that she should be trained in 
habits of accurate thought; that she should understand the 
meaning, the inevitableness, and the loveliness of natural 
laws; and follow at least some one path of scientific attain- 
ment, as far as to the threshold of that bitter Valley of Hu- \ 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS 97 

miliation," into which only the wisest and bravest of men 
can descend, owning themselves forever children, gathering 
pebbles on a boundless shore. It is of little consequence how 
many positions of cities she knows, or how many dates of 
events, or how many names of celebrated persons — it is not 
the object of education to turn a woman into a dictionary; 
but it is deeply necessary that she should be taught to enter 
with her whole personality into the history she reads; to 
picture the passages of it vitally in her own bright imagina- 
tion; to apprehend, with her fine instincts, the pathetic 
circumstances and dramatic relations, which the historian 
too often only eclipses by his reasoning, and disconnects by 
his arrangement: it is for her to trace the hidden equities 
of divine reward, and catch sight, through the darkness, of 
the fateful threads of woven fire that connect error with its 
retribution. But, chiefly of all, she is to be taught to extend 
the limits of her sympathy with respect to that history which 
is being forever determined as the moments pass " in which 
she draws her peaceful breath; and to the contemporary 
calamity which, were it but rightly mourned by her, would 
recur no more hereafter. She is to exercise herself in imagin- 
ing what would be the effects upon her mind and conduct, if 
she were daily brought into the presence of the suffering 
which is not the less real because shut from her sight. She is 
to be taught somewhat to understand the nothingness of the 
proportion which that little world in which she lives and loves, 
bears to the world in which God lives and loves; — and sol- 
emnly she is to be taught to strive that her thoughts of piety 
may not be feeble in proportion to the number they embrace, 
nor her prayer more languid than it is for the momentary 
relief from pain of her husband or her child, when it is uttered 
for the multitudes of those who have none to love them, — 
and is "for all who are desolate and oppressed." 

73. Thus far, I think, I have had your concurrence; per- 
haps you will not be with me in what I believe is most need- 
ful for me to say. There is one dangerous science for women 



98 SESAME AND LILIES 

— one which let them indeed beware how they profanely 
touch-7-that of theology." Strange, and miserably strange, 
that while they are modest enough to doubt their powers, and 
pause at the threshold of sciences where every step is de- 
monstrable and sure, they will plunge headlong,^ and without 
one thought of incompetency, into that science in which the 
greatest men have trembled, and the wisest erred. Strange, 
that they will complacently and pridefully bind up whatever 
vice or folly there is in them, whatever arrogance, petulance, 
or blind incomprehensiveness, into one bitter bundle of 
consecrated myrrh. Strange, in creatures born to be Love 
visible, that where they can know least, they will condemn 
first, and think to recommend themselves to their Master, 
by crawling up the steps of His judgment-throne, to divide 
it with Him. Strangest of all, that they should think they 
were led by the Spirit of the Comforter" into habits of mind 
which have become in them the unmixed elements of home 
discomfort; and that they dare to turn the Household Gods 
of Christianity into ugly idols of their own; — spiritual dolls, 
for them to dress according to their caprice; and from which 
their husbands must turn away in grieved contempt, lest 
they should be shrieked at for breaking them. 

74. I believe, then, with this exception, that a girl's edu- 
cation should be nearly, in its course and material of study, 
the same as a boy's; but quite differently directed. A woman, 
in any rank of life, ought to know whatever her husband is 
likely to know, but to know it in a different way. His com- 
mand of it should be foundational and progressive; hers, 
general and accomplished for daily and helpful use. Not 
but that it would often be wiser in men to learn things in a 
womanly sort of way, for present use, and to seek for the dis- 
cipline and training of their mental powers in such branches 
of study as will be afterwards fittest for social service; but, 
speaking broadly, a man ought to know any language or 
science he learns, thoroughly — while a woman ought to 
know the same language, or science, only so far as may enable 



I 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS 99 

her to sympathize in her husband's pleasures, and in those 
of his best friends. 

75. Yet, observe, with exquisite accuracy as far as she 
reaches. There is a wide diflPerence between elementary 
knowledge and superficial knowledge — between a firm begin- 
ning, and an infirm attempt at compassing. A woman may 
always help her husband by what she knows, however little; 
by what she half knows, or misknows, she will only tease 
him. 

And, indeed, if there were to be any difference between a 
girl's education and a boy's, I should say that of the two the 
girl should be earlier led, as her intellect ripens faster, into 
deep and serious subjects; and that her range of literature 
should be, not more, but less frivolous; calculated to add the 
qualities of patience and seriousness to her natural poign- 
ancy of thought and quickness of wit; and also to keep her 
in a lofty and pure element of thought. I enter not now into 
any question of choice of books; only be sure that her books 
are not heaped up in her lap as they fall out of the package 
of the circulating library," wet with the last and lightest 
spray of the fountain of folly. 

76. Or even of the fountain of wit; for with respect to that 
sore temptation of novel reading, it is not the badness of a 
novel that we should dread, but its overwrought interest. 
The weakest romance is not so stupefying as the lower forms 
of religious exciting literature, and the worst romance is not 
so corrupting as false history, false philosophy, or false po- 
litical essays. But the best romance becomes dangerous, 
if, by its excitement, it renders the ordinary course of life 
uninteresting, and increases the morbid thirst for useless 
acquaintance with scenes in which we shall never be called 

i upon to act. 

77. I speak therefore of good novels only; and our modern 
I literature is particularly rich in types of such. Well read, 

indeed, these books have serious use, being nothing less than 
1 treatises on moral anatomy and chemistry; studies of human 



lOO SESAME AND LILIES 

nature in the elements of it. But I attach little weight to 
this function; they are hardly ever read with earnestness 
enough to permit them to fulfill it. The utmost they usually 
do is to enlarge somewhat the charity of a kind reader, or 
the bitterness of a malicious one; for each will gather, from 
the novel, food for her own disposition. Those who are 
naturally proud and envious will learn from Thackeray to 
despise humanity; those who are naturally gentle, to pity it; 
those who are naturally shallow, to laugh at it.** So, also, 
there might be a serviceable power in novels to bring before 
us, in vividness, a human truth which we had before dimly 
conceived; but the temptation to picturesqueness of state- 
ment is so great, that often the best writers of fiction cannot 
resist it; and our views are rendered so violent and one- 
sided, that their vitality is rather a harm than good. 

78. Without, however, venturing here on any attempt at 
decision how much novel reading should be allowed, let me 
at least clearly assert this, that whether novels, or poetry, 
or history be read, they should be chosen, not for their free- 
dom from evil, but for their possession of good. The chance 
and scattered evil that may here and there haunt, or hide 
itself in, a powerful book, never does any harm to a noble 
girl; but the emptiness of an author oppresses her, and his 
amiable folly degrades her. And if she can have access to 
a good library of old and classical books, there need be no 
choosing at all. Keep the modern magazine and novel out 
of your girl's way; turn her loose into the old library every 
wet day, and let her alone. She will find what is good for her; 
you cannot: for there is just this difference between the mak- 
ing of a girl's character and a boy's — you may chisel a boy 
into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if 
he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But 
you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a 
flower does, — she will wither without sun; she will decay in 
her sheath, as the narcissus does, if you do not give her air 
enough; she may fall, and defile her head in dust, if you leave 



I 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS lOI 

her without help at some moments of her life; but you cannot 
fetter her; she must take her own fair form and way, if she 
take any, and in mind as in body, must have always 

"Her household motions light and free " 
And steps of virgin liberty." 

Let her loose in the library, I say, as you do a fawn in a field. 
It knows the bad weeds twenty times better than you; and 
the good ones too, and will eat some bitter and prickly ones, 
good for it, which you had not the slightest thought would 
have been so." 

79. Then, in art, keep the finest models before her, and let 
her practice in all accomplishments be accurate and thorough, 
so as to enable her to understand more than she accomplishes. 
I say the finest models — that is to say, the truest, simplest, 
usefulest. Note those epithets; they will range through all 
the arts. Try them in music, where you might think them 
the least applicable. I say the truest, that in which the notes 
most closely and faithfully express the meaning of the words, 
or the character of intended emotion; again, the simplest, 
that in which the meaning and melody are attained with the 
fewest and most significant notes possible; and, finally, the 
usefulest, that music which makes the best words most beau- 
tiful, which enchants them in our memories each with its 
own glory of sound, and which applies them closest to the 
heart at the moment we need them. 

80. And not only in the material and in the course, but 
yet more earnestly in the spirit of it, let a girl's education be 
as serious as a boy's. You bring up your girls as if they were 
meant for sideboard ornaments, and then complain of their 
frivolity. Give them the same advantages that you give 
their brothers — appeal to the same grand instincts of virtue 
in them; te^Lch^them also that courage and truth are the pillars 
of their being: — do you think that they would not answer 
that appeal, brave and true as they are even now, when you 
know that there is hardly a girl's school in this Christian 



I02 SESAME AND LILIES 

kingdom where the children's courage or sincerity would be 
thought of half so much importance as their way of coming 
in at a door; and when the whole system of society, as respects 
the mode of establishing them in life, is one rotten plague 
of cowardice and imposture — cowardice, in not daring to let 
them live, or love, except as their neighbors choose; and 
imposture, in bringing, for the purposes of our own pride, the 
full glow of the world's worst vanity upon a girl's eyes, at the 
very period when the whole happiness of her future ekistence 
depends upon her remaining undazzled? 

8 1. And give them, lastly, not only noble teachings, but 
noble teachers. You consider somewhat, before you send 
your boy to school, what kind of a man the master is; — 
whatsoever kind of man he is, you at least give him full 
authority over your son, and show some respect to him your- 
self; if he comes to dine with you, you do not put him at a 
side table; you know also that, at his college, your child's 
immediate tutor will be under the direction of some still 
higher tutor, for whom you have absolute reverence. You 
do not treat the Dean of Christ Church " or the Master of 
Trinity as your inferiors. 

But what teachers do you give your girls, and what rever- 
ence do you show to the teachers you have chosen.? Is a girl 
likely to think her own conduct, or her own intellect, of much 
importance, when you trust the entire formation of her 
character, moral and intellectual, to a person whom you let 
your servants treat with less respect than they do your house- 
keeper (as if the soul of your child were a less charge than 
jams and groceries), and whom you yourself think you 
confer an honor upon by letting her sometimes sit in the 
drawing-room in the evening?" 

82. Thus, then, of literature as her help, and thus of art. 
There is one more help which she cannot do without — one 
which, alone, has sometimes done more than all other in- 
fluences besides, — the help of wild and fair nature. Hear 
this of the education of Joan of Arc: 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS IO3 

"The education of this poor girl was mean, according to the 
present standard; was ineffably grand, according to a purer phil- 
osophic standard; and only not good for our age, because for us 
it would be unattainable. * * * 

"Next after her spiritual advantages, she owed most to the ad- 
vantages of her situation. The fountain of Domremy was on the 
brink of a boundless forest; and it was haunted to that degree by 
fairies, that the parish priest {cure) was obliged to read Mass there 
once a year, in order to keep them in any decent bounds. * * * 

" But the forests of Domremy — those were the glories of the land; 
for in them abode mysterious powers and ancient secrets that 
towered into tragic strength. Abbeys there were, and abbey win- 
dows, — 'like Moorish temples of the Hindoos,' that exercised even 
princely power both in Touraine and in the German Diets.« These 
had their sweet bells that pierced the forests for many a league at 
matins or vespers, and each its own dreamy legend. Few enough, 
and scattered enough, were these abbeys, so as in no degree to dis- 
turb the deep solitude of the region; yet many enough to spread a 
network or awning of Christian sanctity over what else might have 
seemed a heathen wilderness." ^ 

Nov7, you cannot, indeed, have here in England, w^oods 
eighteen miles deep to the center; but you can, perhaps, keep 
a fairy or two for your children yet, if you v^ish to keep them. 
But do you wish it? Suppose you had each, at the back of 
your houses, a garden large enough for your children to play 
in, with just as much lawn as would give them room to 
run, — no more — and that you could not change your abode; 
but that, if you chose, you could double your income, or 
quadruple it, by digging a coal shaft in the middle of the lawn, 
and turning the flower beds into heaps of coke. Would you 
do it .? I hope not. I can tell you, you would be wrong if you 
did, though it gave you income sixtyfold instead of fourfold. 

83. Yet this is what you are doing with all England. The 
whole country is but a little garden, not more than enough 
for your children to run on the lawns of, if you would let 

^"Joan of Arc: in reference to M. Michelet's History of France.*' De 
Quincey's Works. Vol. iii, p. 217. 



I04 SESAME AND LILIES 

them all run there. And this Httle garden you will turn into 
furnace ground," and fill with heaps of cinders, if you can; 
and those children of yours, not you, will suffer for it. For 
the fairies will not be all banished; there are fairies of the 
furnace as of the wood, and their first gifts seem to be "sharp 
arrows of the mighty"; but their last gifts are "coals of 

" n 

jumper. 

84. And yet I cannot — though there is no part of my sub- 
ject that I feel more — press this upon you; for we made so 
little use of the power of nature while we had it that we shall 
hardly feel what we have lost. Just on the other side of the 
Mersey you have your Snowdon," and your Menai Straits, 
and that mighty granite rock beyond the moors of Anglesea, 
splendid in its heathery crest, and foot planted in the deep 
sea, once thought of as sacred — a divine promontory, looking 
westward; the Holy Head or Headland, still not without awe 
when its red light glares first through storm. These are the 
hills, and these the bays and blue inlets, which, among the 
Greeks, would have been always loved, always fateful in in- 
fluence on the national mind. That Snowdon is your Par- 
nassus; but where are its Muses? That Holyhead mountain 
is your Island of ^Egina, but where is its Temple to Minerva.? 

85. Shall I read you what the Christian Minerva" had 
achieved under the shadow of our Parnassus, up to the year 
1848.? — Here is a little account of a Welsh school, from page 
261 of the Report on Wales, published by the Committee of 
Council on Education. This is a school close to a town con- 
taining 5,000 persons: — 

*T then called up a larger class, most of whom had recently come 
to the school. Three girls repeatedly declared they had never heard 
of Christ, and two that they had never heard of God. Two out of 
six thought Christ was on earth now " [they might have had a worse 
thought, perhaps]; " three knew nothing about the crucifixion. Four 
out of seven did not know the names of the months, nor the number 
of days in a year. They had no notion of addition beyond two and 
two, or three and three; their minds were perfect blanks." 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS I05 

Oh, ye women of England!^ from the Princess of that 
Wales to the simplest of you, do not think your own children 
can be brought into their true fold of rest, while these are 
scattered on the hills, as sheep having no shepherd." And 
do not think your daughters can be trained to the truth of 
their own human beauty, while the pleasant places," which 
God made at once for their schoolroom and their playground, 
lie desolate and defiled. You cannot baptize them rightly 
in those inch-deep fonts of yours, unless you baptize them 
also in the sweet waters which the great Lawgiver strikes 
forth forever from the rocks " of your native land — waters 
which a Pagan would have worshiped in their purity, and you 
worship only with pollution. You cannot lead your children 
faithfully to those narrow ax-hewn church altars of yours, 
while the dark azure altars in heaven — the mountains that 
sustain your island throne, — mountains on which a Pagan 
would have seen the powers of heaven rest in every wreathed 
cloud — remain for you without inscription; altars biiilt, not 
to, but by, an Unknown God." 

86. III. Thus far, then, of the nature, thus far of the 
teaching, of woman, and thus of her household office, and 
queenliness. We come now to our last, our widest question, — 
What is her queenly office with respect to the state.? 

Generally, we are under an impression that a man's duties 
are public, and a woman's private. But this is not altogether 
so. A man has a personal work or duty, relating to his own 
home, and a public work or duty, which is the expansion of 
the other, relating to the state. So a woman has a personal 
work or duty, relating to her own home, and a public work 
or duty, which is also the expansion of that. 

Now the man's work for his own home is, as has been said, 
to secure its maintenance, progress, and defense; the woman's 
to secure its order, comfort, and loveliness. 

Expand both these functions. The man's duty, as a 
member of a commonwealth, is to assist in the maintenance, 
in the advance, in the defense of the state. The woman's 



Io6 SESAME AND LILIES 

duty, as a member of the commonwealth, is to assist in the 
ordering, in the comforting, and in the beautiful adornment 
of the state. 

What the man is at his own gate, defending it, if need be, 
against insult and spoil, that also, not in a less, but in a more 
devoted measure, he is to be at the gate of his country, leav- 
ing his home, if need be, even to the spoiler, to do his more 
incumbent work there. 

And, in like manner, what the woman is to be within her 
gates, as the center of order, the balm of distress, and the 
mirror of beauty; that she is also to be without her gates, 
where order is more difficult, distress more imminent, love- 
liness more rare. 

And as within the human heart there is always set an in- 
stinct for all its real duties, — an instinct which you cannot 
quench, but only warp and corrupt if you withdraw it from 
its true purpose; — as there is the intense instinct of love, 
which, rightly disciplined, maintains all the sanctities of 
life and, misdirected, undermines them; and must do either 
the one or the other: — so there is in the human heart an in- 
extinguishable instinct, the love of power, which, rightly 
directed, maintains all the majesty of law and life, and mis- 
directed, wrecks them. 

87. Deep rooted in the innermost life of the heart of man, 
and of the heart of woman, God set it there, and God keeps 
it there. Vainly, as falsely, you blame or rebuke the desire 
of power! — For Heaven's sake, and for Man's sake, desire it 
all you can. But what power? That is all the question. 
Power to destroy.? the lion's limb, and the dragon's breath.? 
Not so. Power to heal, to redeem, to guide, and to guard. 
Power of the scepter and shield; the power of the royal 
hand " that heals in touching, — that binds the fiend and looses 
the captive; the throne that is founded on the rock of Jus- 
tice, and descended from only by steps of mercy. Will you 
not covet such power as this, and seek such throne as this, 
and be no more housewives,** but queens ? 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS I07 

88. It is now long since the women of England arrogated, 
universally, a title which once belonged to nobility only; 
and, having once been in the habit of accepting the simple 
title of gentlewoman, as correspondent to that of gentleman, 
insisted on the privilege of assuming the title of "Lady," ^ 
which properly corresponds only to the title of "Lord." 

I do not blame them for this; but only for their narrow 
motive in this. I would have them desire and claim the title 
of Lady, provided they claim, not merely the title, but the 
office and duty signified by it. Lady means ''bread-giver" 
or ''loaf-giver,"" and Lord means "maintainer of laws," 
and both titles have reference, not to the law which is main- 
tained in the house, nor to the bread which is given to the 
household; but to law maintained for the multitude, and to 
bread broken among the multitude. So that a Lord has 
legal claim only to his title in so far as he is the maintainer 
of the justice of the Lord of Lords; and a Lady has legal 
claim to her title, only so far as she communicates that 
help to the poor representatives of her Master, which women 
once, ministering to Him of their substance," were permitted 
to extend to that Master Himself; and when she is known, 
as He Himself once was, in breaking of bread." 

89. And this beneficent and legal dominion, this power 
of the Dominus, or House-Lord, and of the Domina, or 
House-Lady, is great and venerable, not in the number of 
those through whom it has lineally descended, but in the 
number of those whom it grasps within its sway; it is always 
regarded with reverent worship wherever its dynasty is 
founded on its duty, and its ambition correlative with its 

* I wish there were a true order of chivalry instituted for our English 
youth of certain ranks, in which both boy and girl should receive, at a given 
age, their knighthood and ladyhood by true title; attainable only by certain 
probation and trial both of character and accomplishment; and to be for- 
feited, on conviction, by their peers, of any dishonorable act. Such an in- 
stitution would be entirely, and with all noble results, possible, in a nation 
which loved honor. That it would not be possible among us is not to the 
discredit of the scheme. 



Io8 SESAME AND LILIES 

beneficence. Your fancy is pleased with the thought of being 
noble ladies, with a train of vassals? Be it so: you cannot be 
too noble, and your train cannot be too great; but see to it 
that your train is of vassals whom you serve and feed, not 
merely of slaves who serve and feed you; and that the multi- 
tude which obeys you is of those whom you have comforted, 
not oppressed, — whom you have redeemed, not led into cap- 
tivity. 

90. And this, which is true of the lower or household 
dominion, is equally true of the queenly dominion; — that 
highest dignity is open to you, if you will also accept that 
highest duty. Rex et Regina — Roi et Reine" — ''Right- 
doers"; they diflFer but from the Lady and Lord, in that 
their power is supreme over the mind as over the person — 
that they not only feed and clothe, but direct and teach. 
And whether consciously or not, you must be, in many a 
heart, enthroned: there is no putting by that crown; queens 
you must always be; queens to your lovers; queens to your 
husbands and your sons; queens of higher mystery to the 
world beyond, which bows itself, and will forever bow, be- 
fore the myrtle crown," and the stainless scepter of woman- 
hood. But, alas! you are too often idle and careless queens, 
grasping at majesty in the least things, while you abdicate 
it in the greatest; and leaving misrule and violence to work 
their will among men, in defiance of the power, which, hold- 
ing straight in gift from the Prince of all Peace,^ the wicked 
among you betray, and the good forget. 

91. "Prince of Peace." Note that name. When kings 
rule in that name, and nobles, and the judges of the earth, 
they also, in their narrow place, and mortal measure, receive 
the power of it. There are no other rulers than they: other 
rule than theirs is but wurule; they who govern verily "Dei 
gratia" " are all princes, yes, or princesses, of peace. There 
is not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, but you women 
are answerable for it; not in that you have provoked, but in 
that you have not hindered. Men, by their nature, are 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS 109 

prone to fight; they will fight for any cause, or for none. It 
is for you to choose their cause for them, and to forbid them 
when there is no cause. There is no suffering, no injustice, 
no misery in the earth, but the guilt of it lies lastly with 
you. Men can bear the sight of it, but you should not be able 
to bear it. Men may tread it down without sympathy in 
their own struggle; but men are feeble in sympathy, and con- 
tracted in hope; it is you only who can feel the depths of 
pain; and conceive the way of its healing. Instead of trying 
to do this, you turn away from it; you shut yourselves within 
your park walls and garden gates;" and you are content to 
know that there is beyond them a whole world in wilderness 
— a world of secrets which you dare not penetrate; and of 
suffering which you dare not conceive. 

92. I tell you that this is to me quite the most amazing 
among the phenomena of humanity. I am surprised at no 
depths to which, when once warped from its honor, that hu- 
manity can be degraded. I do not wonder at the miser's 
death, with his hands, as they relax, dropping gold. I do not 
wonder at the sensualist's life, with the shroud wrapped 
about his feet. I do not wonder at the single-handed murder 
of a single victim, done by the assassin in the darkness of the 
railway, or reed-shadow of the marsh. I do not even wonder 
at the myriad-handed murder of multitudes, done boastfully 
in the daylight by the frenzy of nations, and the immeasur- 
able, unimaginable guilt, heaped up from hell to heaven, of 
their priests, and kings. But this is wonderful to me — oh, 
how wonderful! — to see the tender and delicate woman 
among you, with her child at her breast, and a power, if she 
would wield it, over it, and over its father, purer than the 
air of heaven, and stronger than the seas of earth — nay, a 
magnitude of blessing which her husband would not part 
with for all that earth itself, though it were made of one entire 
and perfect chrysolite: " — to see her abdicate this majesty to 
play at precedence with her next-door neighbor! This is 
wonderful — oh, wonderful! — to see her, with every innocent 



no SESAME AND LILIES 

feeling fresh within her, go out in the morning into her gar- 
den to play with the fringes of its guarded flowers, and lift 
their heads when they are drooping, with her happy smile 
upon her face, and no cloud upon her brow, because there is 
a little wall around her place of peace: and yet she knows, in 
her heart, if she would only look for its knowledge, that, out- 
side of that little rose-covered wall, the wild grass, to the 
horizon, is torn up by the agony of men, and beat level by 
the drift of their lifeblood. 

93. Have you ever considered what a deep undermeaning 
there lies, or at least, may be read, if we choose, in our cus- 
tom of strewing flowers before those whom we think most 
happy? Do you suppose it is merely to deceive them into 
the hope that happiness is always to fall thus in showers at 
their feet? — that wherever they pass they will tread on herbs 
of sweet scent, and that the rough ground will be made 
smooth for them by depth of roses? So surely as they believe 
that, they will have, instead, to walk on bitter herbs and 
thorns; and the only softness to their feet will be of snow. 
But it is not thus intended they should believe; there is a 
better meaning in that old custom. The path of a good 
woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise behind her 
steps, not before them. *' Her feet have touched the meadows, 
and left the daisies rosy." " 

94. You think that only a lover's fancy; — false and vain! 
How if it could be true? You think this also, perhaps, only 
a poet's fancy — 

"Even the light harebell raised its head 
Elastic from her airy tread." " 

But it is little to say of a woman, that she only does not 
destroy where she passes. She should revive; the harebells 
should bloom, not stoop, as she passes. You think I am 
rushing into wild hyperbole? Pardon me, not a whit — I 
mean what I say in calm English, spoken in resolute truth. 
You have heard it said — (and I believe there is more than 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS III 

fancy even in that saying, but let it pass for a fanciful one) — 
that flowers only flourish rightly in the garden of some one 
who loves them. I know you would like that to be true; 
you would think it a pleasant magic if you could flush your 
flowers" into brighter bloom by a kind look upon them: nay, 
more, if your look had the power, not only to cheer, but to 
guard; — if you could bid the black blight turn away, and 
the knotted caterpillar spare — if you could bid the dew fall 
upon them in the drought, and say to the south wind, in 
frost — "Come, thou south," and breathe upon my garden, 
that the spices of it may flow out." This you would think 
a great thing? And do you think it not a greater thing, that 
all this, (and how much more than this!) you can do, for 
fairer flowers than these — flowers that could bless you for 
having blessed them, and will love you for having loved 
them; — flowers that have thoughts like yours, and lives like 
yours; and which, once saved, you save forever?" Is this 
only a little power? Far among the moorlands and the 
rocks, — far in the darkness of the terrible streets, — these 
feeble florets are lying, with all their fresh leaves torn, and 
their stems broken — will you never go down to them, nor 
set them in order in their little fragrant beds, nor fence them, 
in their trembling from the fierce wind? Shall morning 
follow morning for you, but not for them; and the dawn rise 
to watch, far away, those frantic Dances of Death; ^ but no 
dawn rise to breathe upon these living banks of wild violet, 
and woodbine, and rose; nor call to you, through your case- 
ment, — call, (not giving you the name of the English poet's 
lady," but the name of Dante's great Matilda, who, on the 
edge of happy Lethe, stood, wreathing flowers with flowers), 
saying: — 

"Come into the garden, Maud, 
For the black bat, night, has flown, 
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad 
And the musk of the roses blown " ? 
^ See note, p. 67. 



112 SESAME AND LILIES 

Will you not go down among them? — among those sweet 
living things, whose new courage, sprung from the earth 
with the deep color of heaven upon it, is starting up in 
strength of goodly spire; and whose purity, washed from 
the dust, is opening, bud by bud, into the flower of 
promise; — and still they turn to you, and for you, '*The 
Larkspur listens " — I hear, I hear! And the Lily whispers — 
I wait." 

95. Did you notice that I missed two lines when I read 
you that first stanza; and think that I had forgotten them? 
Hear them now: — 

"Come into the garden, Maud, 
For the black bat, night, has flown; 
Come into the garden, Maud, 
I am here at the gate, alone." 

Who is it, think you, who stands at the gate of this sweeter 
garden, alone, waiting for you? Did you ever hear, not of 
a Maud, but a Madeline," who went down to her garden in 
the dawn, and found One waiting at the gate, whpm she 
supposed to be the gardener? Have you not sought Him 
often; — sought Him in vain, all through the night;" — sought 
Him in vain at the gate of that old garden " where the fiery 
sword is set ? He is never there ; but at the gate of this garden** 
He is waiting always — waiting to take your hand — ready to 
go down to see the fruits of the valley, to see whether the 
vine has flourished," and the pomegranate budded. There 
you shall see with Him the little tendrils of the vines that 
His hand is guiding — there you shall see the pomegranate 
springing where His hand cast the sanguine seed; — more: 
you shall see the troops of the angel keepers that, with their 
wings, wave away the hungry birds from the pathsides where 
He has sown," and call to each other between the vineyard 
rows, *'Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines, 
for our vines have tender grapes." " Oh — you queens — 
you queens; among the hills and happy greenwood of this 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS II3 

land of yours, shall the foxes have holes, and the birds of the 
air have nests;" and in your cities shall the stones cry out 
against " you, that they are the only pillows where the Son 
of Man can lay His head ? " 



LECTURE III 

THE MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS 

Lecture delivered in the theater of the Royal College of Science, 
Dublin, 1868 

96. When I accepted the privilege of addressing you to- 
day, I was not aware of a restriction with respect to the 
topics of discussion which may be brought before this So- 
ciety 1 — a restriction which, though entirely wise and right 
under the circumstances contemplated in its introduction, 
would necessarily have disabled me, thinking as I think, 
from preparing any lecture for you on the subject of art in 
a form which might be permanently useful. Pardon me, 
therefore, in so far as I must trangress such limitation; for 
indeed my infringement will be of the letter — not of the 
spirit — of your commands. In whatever I may say touching 
the religion which has been the foundation of art, or the 
policy which has contributed to its power, if I offend one, 
I shall oflFend all; for I shall take no note of any separations 
in creeds, or antagonisms in parties: neither do I fear that 
ultimately I shall offend any, by proving — or at least stating 
as capable of positive proof — the connection of all that is 
best in the crafts and arts of man, with the simplicity of his 
faith, and the sincerity of his patriotism. 

97. But I speak to you under another disadvantage, by 
which I am checked in frankness of utterance, not here only, 
but everywhere; namely, that I am never fully aware how 
far my audiences are disposed to give me credit for real 
knowledge of my subject, or how far they grant me attention 
only because I have been sometimes thought an ingenious 

^ That no reference should be made to religious questions, 
114 



MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS 1 15 

or pleasant essayist upon it. For I have had what, in many 
respects, I boldly called the misfortune, to set my words 
sometimes prettily together; not without a foolish vanity 
in the poor knack that I had of doing so; until I was heavily 
punished for this pride, by finding that many people thought 
of the words only, and cared nothing for their meaning." 
Happily, therefore, the power of using such pleasant lan- 
guage—if indeed it ever were mine— is passing away from 
me; and whatever I am now able to say at all, I find myself 
forced to say with great plainness. For my thoughts have 
changed also, as my words have; and whereas in earlier life, 
what little influence I obtained was due perhaps chiefly to 
the enthusiasm with which I was able to dwell on the beauty 
of the physical clouds, and of their colors in the sky; so all 
the influence I now desire to retain must be due to the 
earnestness with which I am endeavoring to trace the form 
and beauty of another kind of clouds than those; the bright 
cloud, of which it is written — 

"What is your life? It is even as a vapor " that appeareth 
for a little time, and then vanisheth away." 

98. I suppose few people reach the middle or latter period 
of their age, without having, at some moment of change or 
disappointment, felt the truth of those bitter words; and 
been startled by the fading of the sunshine from the cloud 
of their life, into the sudden agony of the knowledge that 
the fabric of it was as fragile as a dream, and the endurance 
of it as transient as the dew. But it is not always that, even 
at such times of melancholy surprise, we can enter into any 
true perception that this human life shares, in the nature of 
it, not only the evanescence, but the mystery of the cloud; 
that its avenues are wreathed in darkness, and its forms and 
courses no less fantastic, than spectral and obscure; so that 
not only in the vanity which we cannot grasp, but m the 
I shadow which we cannot pierce, it is true of this cloudy life 
of ours, that "man walketh in a vain shadow, and dis- 
1 quieteth himself in vain." 



Il6 SESAME AND LILIES 

99. And least of all, whatever may have been the eager- 
ness of our passions, or the height of our pride, are we able 
to understand in its depth the third and most solemn char- 
acter in which our life is like those clouds of heaven; that to 
it belongs not only their transience, not only their mystery, 
but also their power; that in the cloud of the human soul 
there is a fire stronger than the lightning, and a grace more 
precious than the rain; and that though of the good and evil 
it shall one day be said alike, that the place that knew them 
knows them no more, there is an infinite separation between 
those whose brief presence had there been a blessing, like the 
mist of Eden that went up from the earth to water the garden, 
and those whose place knew them only as a drifting and 
changeful shade, of whom the heavenly sentence is, that 
they are "wells without water; clouds that are carried with 
a tempest, to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for 



ever r 



100. To those among us, however, who have lived long 
enough to form some just estimate of the rate of the changes 
which are, hour by hour in accelerating catastrophe, mani- 
festing themselves in the laws, the arts, and the creeds of 
men, it seems to me, that now at least, if never at any former 
time, the thoughts of the true nature of our life, and of its 
powers and responsibilities, should present themselves with 
absolute sadness and sternness. And although I know that 
this feeling is much deepened in my own mind by disappoint- 
ment, which, by chance, has attended the greater number of 
my cherished purposes, I do not for that reason distrust the 
feeling itself, though I am on my guard against an exaggerated 
degree of it: nay, I rather believe that in periods of new effort 
and violent change, disappointment is a wholesome medicine; 
and that in the secret of it, as in the twilight so bj^ploved by 
Titian," we may see the colors of things with deeper truth 
than in the most dazzling sunshine. And because these 
truths about the works of men, which I want to bring to-day 
before you, are most of them sad ones, though at the same 



MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS II7 

time helpful; and because also I believe that your kind Irish 
hearts will answer more gladly to the truthful expression of 
a personal feeling, than to the exposition of an abstract prin- 
ciple, I will permit myself so much unreserved speaking of 
my own causes of regret, as may enable you to make just 
allowance for what, according to your sympathies, you will 
call either the bitterness, or the insight, of a mind which has 
surrendered its best hopes, and been foiled in its favorite 
aims. 

loi. I spent the ten strongest years of my life (from 
twenty to thirty), in endeavoring to show the excellence of 
the work of the man whom I believed, and rightly believed, 
to be the greatest painter of the schools of England since 
Reynolds. I had then perfect faith in the power of every 
great truth or beauty to prevail ultimately, and take its 
right place in usefulness and honor; and I strove to bring the 
painter's work into this due place, while the painter was yet 
alive. But he knew, better than I, the uselessness of talking 
about what people could not see for themselves." He always 
discouraged me scornfully, even when he thanked me — and 
he died before even the superficial effect of my work was 
visible. I went on, however, thinking I could at least be of 
use to the public, if not to him, in proving his power. My 
books got talked about a little. The prices of modern pic- 
tures, generally, rose, and I was beginning to take some 
pleasure in a sense of gradual victory, when, fortunately or 
unfortunately, an opportunity of perfect trial undeceived 
me at once, and forever. The Trustees of the National 
Gallery commissioned me to arrange the Turner drawings 
there, and permitted me to prepare three hundred examples 
of his studies from nature, for exhibition at Kensington. 
At Kensington they were and are, placed for exhibition; 
but they are not exhibited, for the room in which they hang 
is always empty." 

102. Well — this showed me at once, that those ten years 
of my life had been, in their chief purpose, lost. For that, I 



Il8 SESAME AND LILIES 

did not so much care; I had, at least, learned my own business 
thoroughly, and should be able, as I fondly supposed, after 
such a lesson, now to use my knowledge with better effect. 
But what I did care for, was the — to me frightful — discovery, 
that the most splendid genius in the arts might be permitted 
by Providence to labor and perish uselessly; that in the very 
fineness of it there might be something rendering it invisible 
to ordinary eyes;" but, that with this strange excellence, 
faults might be mingled which would be as deadly as its vir- 
tues were vain; that the glory of it was perishable, as well 
as invisible, and the gift and grace of it might be to us, as 
snow in summer, and as rain in harvest. 

103. That was the first mystery of life to me. But, while 
my best energy was given to the study of painting, I had put 
collateral effort, more prudent, if less enthusiastic, into that 
of architecture; and in this I could not complain of meeting 
with no sympathy. Among several personal reasons which 
caused me to desire that I might give this, my closing lec- 
ture on the subject of art here, in Ireland, one of the chief 
was, that in reading it, I should stand near the beautiful 
building, — the engineers' school of your college, — which was 
the first realization I had the joy to see, of the principles I 
had, until then, been endeavoring to teach; but which, alas, 
is now, to me, no more than the richly canopied monument 
of one of the most earnest souls that ever gave itself to the 
arts, and one of my truest and most loving friends, Benjamin 
Woodward." Nor was it here in Ireland only that I received 
the help of Irish sympathy and genius. When, to another 
friend, Sir Thomas Deane, with Mr. Woodward, was in- 
trusted the building of the museum at Oxford, the best de- 
tails of the work were executed by sculptors who had been 
born and trained here; and the first window of the facade of 
the building, in which was inaugurated the study of natural 
science in England, in true fellowship with literature, was 
carved from my design by an Irish sculptor. 

104. You may perhaps think that no man ought to speak 



MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS II9 

of disappointment, to whom, even in one branch of labor, so 
much success was granted. Had Mr. Woodward now been 
beside me, I had not so spoken; but his gentle and passionate 
spirit was cut off from the fulfillment of its purposes, and the 
work we did together is now become vain. It may not be 
so in future; but the architecture we endeavored to introduce 
is inconsistent alike with the reckless luxury, the deforming 
mechanism, and the squalid misery of modern cities; among 
the formative fashions of the day, aided especially in Eng- 
land, by ecclesiastical sentiment, it indeed obtained notoriety; 
and sometimes behind an engine furnace, or a railroad bank, 
you may detect the pathetic discord of its momentary grace, 
and, with toil, decipher its floral carvings choked with soot." 
I felt answerable to the schools I loved, only for their injury. 
I perceived that this new portion of my strength had also 
been spent in vain; and from amidst streets of iron, and 
palaces of crystal, shrank back at last to the carving of the 
mountain and color of the flower. 

105. And still I could tell of failure, and failure repeated, 
as years went on; but I have trespassed enough on your pa- 
tience to show you, in part, the causes of my discouragement. 
Now let me more deliberately tell you its results. You know 
there is a tendency in the minds of many men, when they are 
heavily disappointed in the main purposes of their life, to 
feel, and perhaps in warning, perhaps in mockery, to declare, 
that Hfe itself is a vanity. Because it has disappointed them, 
they think its nature is of disappointment always, or at best, 
of pleasure that can be grasped by imagination only; that the 
cloud of it has no strength nor fire within; but is a painted 
cloud only, to be delighted in, yet despised. You know how 
beautifully Pope " has expressed this particular phase of 
thought : — 

"Meanwhile opinion gilds, with varying rays. 
These painted clouds that beautify our days; 
Each want of happiness by hope supplied, 
And each vacuity of sense, by pride. 



I20 SESAME AND LILIES 

Hope builds as fast as Knowledge can destroy; 
In Folly's cup, still laughs the bubble joy. 
One pleasure past, another still we gain, 
And not a vanity is given in vain." 

But the effect of failure upon my own mind has been just the 
reverse of this. The more that my life disappointed me, the 
more solemn and wonderful it became to me. It seemed, 
contrarily to Pope's saying, that the vanity of it was indeed 
given in vain; but that there was something behind the veil 
of it, which was not vanity. It became to me not a painted 
cloud, but a terrible and impenetrable one: not a mirage, 
which vanished as I drew near, but a pillar of darkness,** to 
which I was forbidden to draw near. For I saw that both my 
own failure, and such success in petty things as in its poor 
triumph seemed to me worse than failure, came from the 
want of sufficiently earnest effort to understand the whole 
law and meaning of existence, and to bring it to noble and 
due end; as, on the other hand, I saw more and more clearly 
that all enduring success in the arts, or in any other occupa- 
tion, had come from the ruling of lower purposes, not by a 
conviction of their nothingness, but by a solemn faith in the 
advancing power of human nature, or in the promise, how- 
ever dimly apprehended, that the mortal part of it would 
one day be swallowed up in immortality; and that, indeed, 
the arts themselves never had reached any vital strength or 
honor but in the effort to proclaim this immortality, and in 
the service either of great and just religion, or of some un- 
selfish patriotism, and law of such national life as must be 
the foundation of religion. 

io6. Nothing that I have ever said is more true or nec- 
essary — nothing has been more misunderstood or misapplied 
— than my strong assertion, that the arts can never be right 
themselves, unless their motive is right. It is misunderstood 
this way: weak painters, who have never learned their busi- 
ness, and cannot lay a true line, continually come to me, 
crying out — "Look at this picture of mine; it must be good. 



(MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS 121 

I had such a lovely motive. I have put my whole heart into 
it, and taken years to think over its treatment." Well, the 
only answer for these people is — if one had the cruelty to 
make it — ''Sir, you cannot think over anything in any num- 
ber of years, — you haven't the head to do it; and though you 
had fine motives, strong enough to make you burn yourself 
in a slow fire, if only first you could paint a picture, you can't 
paint one, nor half an inch of one; you haven't the hand to 
do it." 

But, far more decisively we have to say to the men who do 
know their business, or may know it if they choose — "Sir, 
you have this gift, and a mighty one; see that you serve your 
nation faithfully with it. It is a greater trust than ships and 
armies: you might cast them away, if you were their captain, 
with less treason to your people than in casting your own 
glorious power away, and serving the devil with it instead of 
men. Ships and armies you may replace if they are lost, but 
a great intellect, once abused, is a curse to the earth forever." 
107. This, then, I meant by saying that the arts must 
have noble motive. This also I said respecting them, that 
they never had prospered, nor could prosper, but when they 
had such true purpose, and were devoted to the proclamation 
of divine truth or law. And yet I saw also that they had 
always failed in this proclamation — that poetry and sculp- 
ture, and painting, though only great when they strove to 
teach us something about the gods, never had taught us any- 
thing trustworthy about the gods, but had always betrayed 
their trust in the crisis of it, and, with their powers at the 
full reach, became ministers to pride and to lust. And I 
felt also, with increasing amazement, the unconquerable ap- 
athy in ourselves the hearers, no less than in these the teach- 
1 ers; and that, while the wisdom and tightness of every act 
I and art of life could only be consistent with a right under- 
standing of the ends of life, we were all plunged as in a lan- 
guid dream — our heart fat, and our eyes heavy, and our ears 
I closed, lest the inspiration of hand or voice should reach us — 



122 SESAME AND LILIES 

lest we should see with our eyes, and understand with our 
hearts, and be healed. 

io8." This intense apathy in all of us is the first great 
mystery of life; it stands in the way of every perception, 
every virtue. There is no making ourselves feel enough 
astonishment at it. That the occupations or pastimes of 
life should have no motive, is understandable; but — That 
life itself should have no motive — that we neither care to 
find out what it may lead to, nor to guard against its being 
forever taken away from us — here is a mystery indeed. 
For just suppose I were able to call at this moment to any- 
one in this audience by name, and to tell him positively that 
I knew a large estate had been lately left to him on some 
curious conditions; but that, though I knew it was large, I 
did not know how large, nor even where it was — whether in 
the East Indies or the West, or in England, or at the Antip- 
odes. I only knew it was a vast estate, and that there was 
a chance of his losing altogether if he did not soon find out 
on what terms it had been left to him. Suppose I were able 
to say this positively to any single man in this audience, and 
he knew that I did not speak without warrant, do you think 
that he would rest content with that vague knowledge, if it 
were anywise possible to obtain more.? Would he not give 
every energy to find some trace of the facts, and never rest 
till he had ascertained where this place was, and what it was 
like? And suppose he were a young man, and all he could 
discover by his best endeavor was, that the estate was never 
to be his at all, unless he persevered, during certain years of 
probation, in an orderly and industrious life; but that, accord- 
ing to the tightness of his conduct, the portion of the estate 
assigned to him would be greater or less, so that it literally 
depended on his behavior from day to day whether he got 
ten thousand a year, or thirty thousand a year, or nothing 
whatever— would you not think it strange if the youth never 
troubled himself to satisfy the conditions in any way, nor 
even to know what was required of him, but lived exactly as 



MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS 123 

he chose, and never inquired whether his chances of the es- 
tate were increasing or passing away? Well, you know that 
this is actually and literally so with the greater number of 
the educated persons now living in Christian countries. 
Nearly every man and woman, in any company such as this, 
outwardly professes to believe — and a large number unques- 
tionably think they believe — much more than this; not only 
that a quite unlimited estate is in prospect for them if they 
please the Holder of it, but that the infinite contrary of such 
a possession — an estate of perpetual misery, is in store for 
them if they displease this great Land-Holder, this great 
Heaven-Holder. And yet there is not one in a thousand of 
these human souls that cares to think, for ten minutes of the 
day, where this estate is, or how beautiful it is, or what kind 
of life they are to lead in it, or what kind of life they must 
lead to obtain it. 
I 109. You fancy that you care to know this: so little do you 
'' care that, probably, at this moment many of you are dis- 
pleased with me for talking of the matter! You came to 
hear about the Art of this world, not about the life of the 
next, and you are provoked with me for talking of what you 
can hear any Sunday in church. But do not be afraid. I 
will tell you something before you go about pictures, and 
carvings, and pottery, and what else you would like better 
to hear of than the other world. Nay, perhaps you say, 
"We want you to talk of pictures and pottery, because we 
are sure that you know something of them, and you know 
nothing of the other world." Well — I don't. That is quite 
true. But the very strangeness and mystery of which I urge 
you to take notice is in this — that I do not; — nor you either. 
Can you answer a single bold question unflinchingly about 
that other world? — Are you sure there is a heaven? Sure 
there is a hell ? Sure that men are dropping before your faces 
through the pavements of these streets into eternal fire, or 
sure that they are not? Sure that at your own death you 
are going to be delivered from all sorrow, to be endowed with 



124 SESAME AND LILIES 

all virtue, to be gifted with all felicity, and raised into per- 
petual companionship with a King, compared to whom the 
kings of the earth are as grasshoppers, and the nations as the 
dust of His feet? Are you sure of this? or, if not sure, do 
any of us so much as care to make it sure? and, if not, how 
can anything that we do be right — how can anything we 
think be wise; what honor can there be in the arts that amuse 
us, or what profit in the possessions that please? 

Is not this a mystery of life? 

no. But farther," you may perhaps think it a beneficent 
ordinance for the generality of men that they do not, with 
earnestness or anxiety, dwell on such questions of the future; 
because the business of the day could not be done if this 
kind of thought were taken by all of us for the morrow. Be 
it so: but at least we might anticipate that the greatest and 
wisest of us, who were evidently the appointed teachers of 
the rest, would set themselves apart to seek out whatever 
could be surely known of the future destinies of their race; 
and to teach this in no rhetorical or ambiguous manner, but 
in the plainest and most severely earnest words. 

Now, the highest representatives of men who have thus 
endeavored, during the Christian era, to search out these 
deep things, and relate them, are Dante and Milton." There 
are none who for earnestness of thought, for mastery of word, 
can be classed with these. I am not at present, mind you, 
speaking of persons set apart in any priestly or pastoral 
office, to deliver creeds to us, or doctrines; but of men who 
try to discover and set forth, as far as by human intellect is 
possible, the facts of the other world. Divines may perhaps 
teach us how to arrive there, but only these two poets have 
in any powerful manner striven to discover, or in any definite 
words professed to tell, what we shall see and become there: 
or how those upper and nether worlds are, and have been, 
inhabited. 

III. And what have they told us? Milton's account of 
the most important event in his whole system of the universe, 



p 



MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS 1 25 

the fall of the angels, is evidently unbelievable to himself; 
and the more so, that it is wholly founded on, and in a great 
part spoiled and degraded from, Hesiod's account ** of the 
decisive war of the younger gods with the Titans. The rest 
of his poem is a picturesque drama, in which every artifice 
of invention is visibly and consciously employed; not a single 
fact being, for an instant, conceived as tenable by any living 
faith. Dante's conception is far more intense, and, by him- 
self, for the time, not to be escaped from; it is indeed a vision, 
but a vision only, and that one of the wildest that ever en- 
tranced a soul — a dream in which every grotesque type or 
fantasy of heathen traditon is renewed, and adorned; and the 
destinies of the Christian Church, under their most sacred 
symbols, become literally subordinate to the praise, and are 
only to be understood by the aid, of one dear Florentine 
maiden." 

1 12. I tell you truly that, as I strive more with this strange 
lethargy and trance in myself, and awake to the meaning 
and power of life, it seems daily more amazing to me that 
men such as these should dare to play with the most precious 
truths (or the most deadly untruths), by which the whole 
human race listening to them could be informed, or deceived; 
— all the world their audiences forever, with pleased ear, and 
passionate heart ;'^ — and yet, to this submissive infinitude of 
souls, and evermore succeeding and succeeding multitude, 
hungry for bread of life, they do but play upon sweetly 
modulated pipes; with pompous nomenclature adorn the 
councils of hell; touch a troubadour's guitar to the courses of 
the suns; and fill the openings of eternity, before which proph- 
ets have veiled their faces, and which angels desire to look 
into, with idle puppets of their scholastic imagination, and 
melancholy lights of frantic faith in their lost mortal love. 

Is not this a mystery of life? 

113. But more. We have to remember that these two 
great teachers were both of them warped in their temper, and 
thwarted in their search for truth. They were men of in- 



126 SESAME AND LILIES "^^m 

tellectual war, unable, through darkness of controversy,** or 
stress of personal grief, to discern where their own ambition 
modified their utterances of the moral law; or their own 
agony mingled with their anger at its violation. But greater 
men than these have been — innocent-hearted — too great for 
contest. Men, like Homer and Shakespeare, of so unrecog- 
nized personality, that it disappears in future ages, and 
becomes ghostly, like the tradition of a lost heathen god. 
Men, therefore, to whose unoffended, uncondemning sight, 
the whole of human nature reveals itself in a pathetic weak- 
ness, with which they will not strive; or in mournful and 
transitory strength, which they dare not praise. And all 
Pagan and Christian civilization thus becomes subject to 
them. It does not matter how little, or how much, any of us 
have read, either of Homer or Shakespeare; everything 
round us, in substance, or in thought, has been molded by 
them. All Greek gentlemen were educated under Homer. 
All Roman gentlemen, by Greek literature. All Italian, and 
French, and English gentlemen, by Roman literature, and 
by its principles. Of the scope of Shakespeare, I will say 
only, that the intellectual measure of every man since born, 
in the domains of creative thought, may be assigned to him, 
according to the degree in which he has been taught by 
Shakespeare. Well, what do these two men, centers of 
mortal intelligence, deliver to us of conviction respecting 
what it most behooves that intelligence to grasp.? What is 
their hope; their crown of rejoicing? what manner of exhorta- 
tion have they for us, or of rebuke.'' what lies next their own 
hearts, and dictates their undying words? Have they any 
peace to promise to our unrest — any redemption to our 
misery? 

114. Take Homer first, and think if there is any sadder 
image of human fate than the great Homeric story. The 
main features in the character of Achilles are its intense de- 
sire of justice, and its tenderness of affection. And in that 
bitter song of the Iliad, this man, though aided continually 



MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS 1 27 

by the wisest of the gods, and burning with the desire of 
justice in his heart, becomes yet, through ill-governed pas- 
sion, the most unjust of men: and, full of the deepest ten- 
derness in his heart, becomes yet, through ill-governed pas- 
sion, the most cruel of men." Intense alike in love and in 
friendship, he loses, first his mistress, and then his friend; 
for the sake of the one, he surrenders to death the armies 
of his own land; for the sake of the other, he surrenders all. 
Will a man lay down his life for his friend? Yea — even for 
his dead friend, this Achilles," though goddess-born, and 
goddess-taught, gives up his kingdom, his country, and his 
life — casts alike the innocent and guilty, with himself, into 
one gulf of slaughter, and dies at last by the hand of the 
basest of his adversaries. 

Is not this a mystery of life? 

115. But what, then, is the message to us of our own 
poet," and searcher of hearts, after fifteen hundred years of 
Christian faith have been numbered over the graves of men? 
Are his words more cheerful than the Heathen's — is his hope 
more near — his trust more sure — his reading of fate more 
happy? Ah, no! He diflPers from the Heathen poet chiefly 
in this — that he recognizes, for deliverance, no gods nigh 
at hand; and that, by petty chance — by momentary folly — 
by broken message — by fool's tyranny — or traitor's snare, 
the strongest and most righteous are brought to their ruin, 
and perish without word of hope. He indeed, as part of 
his rendering of character, ascribes the power and modesty 
of habitual devotion, to the gentle and the just. The death- 
bed of Katharine" is bright with vision of angels; and the 
great soldier-king," standing by his few dead, acknowledges 
the presence of the hand that can save alike by many or by 
few. But observe that from those who with deepest spirit, 
meditate, and with deepest passion, mourn, there are no 
such words as these; nor in their hearts are any such consola- 
tions. Instead of the perpetual sense of the helpful presence 
of the Deity, which, through all heathen tradition, is the 



128 SESAME AND LILIES 

source of heroic strength, in battle, in exile, and in the valley 
of the shadow of death, we find only in the great Christian 
poet, the consciousness of a moral law, through which "the 
gods are just," and of our pleasant vices make instruments to 
scourge us"; and of the resolved arbitration of the destinies, 
that conclude into precision of doom what we feebly and 
blindly began; and force us, when our indiscretion serves 
us, and our deepest plots do pall, to the confession, that 
"there's a divinity" that shapes our ends, rough hew them 
how we will." 

Is not this " a mystery of life ? 

ii6. Be it so then. About this human life that is to be, 
or that is, the wise religious men tell us nothing that we can 
trust; and the wise contemplative men, nothing that can 
give us peace. But there is yet a third class, to whom we 
may turn — the wise practical men. We have sat at the feet 
of the poets who sang of heaven, and they have told us their 
dreams. We have listened to the poets who sang of earth, 
and they have chanted to us dirges, and words of despair. 
But there is one class of men more: — men, not capable of 
vision, nor sensitive to sorrow, but firm of purpose — prac- 
ticed in business; learned in all that can be (by handling) 
known. Men, whose hearts and hopes are wholly in this 
present world, from whom, therefore, we may surely learn, 
at least, how, at present, conveniently to live in it. What 
will they say to us, or show us by example? These kings — 
these councilors — these statesmen and builders of kingdoms 
— these capitalists and men of business, who weigh the 
earth, and the dust of it, in a balance. They know the world, 
surely; and what is the mystery of life to us, is none to them. 
They can surely show us how to live, while we live, and to 
gather out of the present world what is best. 

117. I think I can best tell you their answer, by telling 
you a dream I had once. For though I am no poet, I have 
dreams sometimes: — I dreamed I was at a child's May-day 
party, in which every means of entertainment had been pro- 



MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS 1 29 

vided for them, by a wise and kind host. It was in a stately- 
house, with beautiful gardens attached to it; and the chil- 
dren had been set free in the rooms and gardens, with no care 
whatever but how to pass their afternoon rejoicingly. They 
did not, indeed, know much about what was to happen next 
day; and some of them, I thought, were a little frightened, 
because there was a chance of their being sent to a new 
school where there were examinations; but they kept the 
thoughts of that out of their heads as well as they could, and 
resolved to enjoy themselves. The house, I said, was in a 
beautiful garden, and in the garden were all kinds of flowers; 
sweet grassy banks for rest; and smooth lawns for play; and 
pleasant streams and woods; and rocky places for climbing. 
And the children were happy for a little while, but presently 
they separated themselves into parties; and then each party 
declared, it would have a piece of the garden for its own, and 
that none of the others should have anything to do with that 
piece. Next, they quarreled violently, which pieces they 
would have; and at last the boys took up the thing, as boys 
should do, "practically,'' and fought in the flower beds till 
there was hardly a flower left standing; then they trampled 
down each other's bits of the garden out of spite; and the 
girls cried till they could cry no more; and so they all lay 
down at last breathless in the ruin, and waited for the time 
when they were to be taken home in the evening.^ 

118. Meanwhile, the children in the house had been mak- 
ing themselves happy also in their manner. For them, there 
had been provided every kind of indoors pleasure: there was 
music for them to dance to; and the library was open, with 
all manner of amusing books; and there was a museum, full 
of the most curious shells, and animals, and birds; and there 
was a workshop, with lathes and carpenter's tools, for the 
ingenious boys; and there were pretty fantastic dresses, for 

^ I have sometimes been asked what this means. I intended it to set forth 
the wisdom of men in war contending for kingdoms, and what follows to set 
forth their wisdom in peace, contending for wealth. 



I30 SESAME AND LILIES 

the girls to dress in; and there were microscopes, and kalei- 
doscopes; and whatever toys a child could fancy; and a table, 
in the dining room, loaded with everything nice to eat. 

But, in the midst of all this, it struck two or three of the 
more ** practical" childfen, that they would like some of the 
brass-headed nails that studded the chairs; and so they set 
to work to pull them out. Presently, the others, who were 
reading, or looking at shells, took a fancy to do the like; and, 
in a little while, all the children, nearly, were spraining their 
fingers, in pulling out brass-headed nails. With all that they 
could pull out, they were not satisfied; and then, everybody 
wanted some of somebody else's. And at last, the really 
practical and sensible ones declared, that nothing was of any 
real consequence, that afternoon, except to get plenty of 
brass-headed nails; and that the books, and the cakes, and 
the microscopes, were of no use at all in themselves, but only, 
if they could be exchanged for nail-heads. And, at last, they 
began to fight for nail-heads, as the others fought for the bits 
of garden. Only here and there, a despised one shrank away 
into a corner, and tried to get a little quiet with a book, in 
the midst of the noise; but all the practical ones thought of 
nothing else but counting nail-heads all the afternoon — even 
though they knew they would not be allowed to carry so 
much as one brass knob away with them. But no — it was — 
*'Who has most nails? I have a hundred, and you have fifty; 
or, I have a thousand and you have two. I must have as 
many as you before I leave the house, or I cannot possibly 
go home in peace." At last, they made so much noise that 
I awoke, and thought to myself, "What a false dream that 
is, of children.'' The child is the father of the man; and 
wiser. Children never do such foolish things. Only men do. 

119.** But there is yet one last class of persons to be in- 
terrogated. The wise religious men we have asked in vain; 
the wise contemplative men, in vain; the wise worldly men, 
in vain. But there is another group yet. In the midst of 
this vanity of empty religion — of tragic contemplation — of 



MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS 13 1 

wrathful and wretched ambition, and dispute for dust, there 
is yet one great group of persons, by whom all these disput- 
grs live— the persons, who have determmed, or have had it 
by a beneficent Providence determined for them, that they 
will do something useful; that whatever may be prepared 
for them hereafter, or happen to them here, they will, at 
least, deserve the food that God gives them by winnmg it 
honorably; and that, however fallen from the purity or far 
from the peace, of Eden, they will carry out the duty of 
human dominion, though they have lost its felicity; and 
dress and keep the wilderness, though they no more can 
dress or keep the garden. 

These,-hewers of wood, and drawers of water-these 
bent under burdens, or torn of scourges-these, that dig and 
weave— that plant and build ; workers in wood, and in marble, 
and in iron-by whom all food, clothing, habitation, furni- 
ture, and means of delight are produced, for themselves, and 
for all men beside; men, whose deeds are good, though their 
words may be few; men, whose lives are serviceable, be they 
never so short, and worthy of honor, be they never so hum- 
ble;-from these, surely at least, we may receive some clear 
message of teaching: and pierce, for an instant, into the mys- 
tery of life, and of its arts. . 

120. Yes; from these, at last, we do receive a lesson. But 
I grieve to say, or rather-for that is the deeper truth of the 
matter-I rejoice to say-this ■"«"g^«.°[.'l^"^^ "" ""^^ ^' 
received by joining them «— not by thinking about them. 

You sent for me to talk to you of art; and I have obeyed 
you in coming. But the main thing I have to tell you is,- 
that art must not be talked about." The fact that there is 
talk about it at all, signifies that it is ill done, or cannot be 
done. No true painter ever speaks, or ever has spoken, 
much of his art. The greatest speak nothing. Even Reyn- 
olds » is no exception, for he wrote of all that he could not 
himself do, and was utterly silent respecting all that he him- 
self did. 



132 SESAME AND LILIES 

The moment a man can really do his work, he becomes 
speechless about it. All words become idle to him — all 
theories. 

121. Does a bird need to theorize about building its nest, 
or boast of it when built } All good work " is essentially done 
that way — without hesitation, without difficulty, without 
boasting; and in the doers of the best, there is an inner and 
involuntary power which approximates literally to the in- 
stinct of an animal — nay, I am certain that in the most per- 
fect human artists, reason does not supersede instinct, but is 
added to an instinct as much more divine than that of the 
lower animals as the human body is more beautiful than 
theirs; that a great singer sings not with less instinct than 
the nightingale, but with more — only more various, appli- 
cable, and governable; that a great architect does not build 
with less instinct than the beaver or the bee, but with more — 
with an innate cunning of proportion that embraces all 
beauty, and a divine ingenuity of skill that improvises all 
construction. But be that as it may — be the instinct less or 
more than that of inferior animals — like or unlike theirs, 
still the human art is dependent on that first, and then upon 
an amount of practice, of science, — and of imagination dis- 
ciplined by thought, which the true possessor of it knows to 
be incommunicable, and the true critic of it, inexplicable, 
except through long process of laborious years. That journey 
of life's conquest, in which hills over hills, and Alps on Alps 
arose, and sank, — do you think you can make another trace 
it painlessly, by talking? Why, you cannot even carry us 
up an Alp, by talking. You can guide us up it, step by step, 
no otherwise — even so, best silently. You girls, who have 
been among the hills, know how the bad guide chatters and 
gesticulates, and it is ''put your foot here," and "mind how 
you balance yourself there"; but the good guide walks on 
quietly, without a word, only with his eyes on you when need 
is, and his arm like an iron bar, if need be. 

122. In that slow way, also, art can be taught — if you 



MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS 133 

have faith in your guide, and will let his arm be to you as an 
iron bar when need is. But in what teacher of art have you 
such faith? Certainly not in me; for, as I told you at first, 
I know well enough it is only because you think I can talk, 
not because you think I know my business, that you let me 
speak to you at all. If I were to tell you anything that seemed 
to you strange, -you would not believe it, and yet it would 
only be in telling you strange things that I could be of use 
to you." I could be of great use to you — infinite use, with 
brief saying, if you would believe it; but you would not, just 
because the thing that would be of real use would displease 
you. You are all wild, for instance, with admiration of 
Gustave Dore." Well, suppose I were to tell you, in the 
strongest terms I could use, that Gustave Dore's art was 
bad — bad, not in weakness, — not in failure, — but bad with 
dreadful power — the power of the Furies and the Harpies 
mingled, enraging, and polluting; that so long as you looked 
at it, no perception of pure or beautiful art was possible for 
you. Suppose I were to tell you that! What would be the 
use? Would you look at Gustave Dore less? Rather, more, 
I fancy. On the other hand, I could soon put you into good 
humor with me, if I chose. I know well enough what you 
like, and how to praise it to your better liking. I could talk 
to you about moonlight, and twilight, and spring flowers, 
and autumn leaves, and the Madonnas of Raphael — how 
motherly! " and the Sibyls of Michael Angelo— how majestic! 
and the Saints of Angelico — how pious! and the Cherubs 
of Correggio — how delicious! Old as I am, I could play 
you a tune on the harp yet, that you would dance to. But 
neither you nor I should be a bit the better or wiser; or, if 
we were, our increased wisdom could be of no practical effect. 
For, indeed, the arts, as regards teachableness, differ from 
the sciences also in this, that their power is founded not 
merely on facts which can be communicated, but on dis- 
positions which require to be created. Art is neither to be 
achieved by effort of thinking, nor explained by accuracy of 



134 SESAME AND LILIES 

speaking. It is the instinctive and necessary result of powers 
which can only be developed through the mind of successive 
generations, and which finally burst into life under social 
conditions as slow of growth as the faculties they regulate. 
Whole eras of mighty history are summed, and the passions 
of dead myriads are concentrated, in the existence of a noble 
art; and if that noble art were among us, we should feel it 
and rejoice; not caring in the least to hear lectures on it; 
and since it is not among us, be assured we have to go back 
to the root of it, or, at least, to the place where the stock of 
it is yet alive, and the branches began to die. 

123. And now, may I have your pardon for pointing out, 
partly with reference to matters which are at this time of 
greater moment than the arts— that if we undertook such 
recession to the vital germ of national arts that have decayed, 
we should find a more singular arrest of their power in 
Ireland than in any other European country. For in the 
eighth century, Ireland possessed a school of art in her man- 
uscripts and sculpture, which, in many of its qualities — 
apparently in all essential qualities of decorative invention 
— was quite without rival; seeming as if it might have ad- 
vanced to the highest triumphs in architecture and in paint- 
ing. But there was one fatal flaw in its nature, by which 
it was stayed, and stayed with a conspicuousness of pause to 
which there is no parallel: so that, long ago, in tracing the 
progress of European schools from infancy to strength, I chose 
for the students of Kensington, in a lecture since published, 
two characteristic examples of early art, of equal skill; but 
in the one case, skill which was progressive — in the other, 
skill which was at pause. In the one case, it was work recep- 
tive of correction — hungry for correction — and in the other, 
work which inherently rejected correction. I chose for them 
a corrigible Eve, and an incorrigible Angel, and I grieve to 
say that the incorrigible Angel was also an Irish Angel! 1 

124.** And the fatal diflPerence lay wholly in this. In both 
1 See The Two Paths, 



MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS 135 

pieces of art there was an equal falling short of the needs of 
fact; but the Lombardic Eve knew she was in the wrong, 
and the Irish Angel thought himself all right. The eager 
Lombardic sculptor, though firmly insisting on his childish 
idea, yet showed in the irregular broken touches of the fea- 
tures, and the imperfect struggle for softer lines in the form, 
a perception of beauty and law that he could not render; 
there was the strain of effort, under conscious imperfection, 
in every line. But the Irish missal-painter had drawn his 
angel with no sense of failure, in happy complacency, and 
put red dots into the palms of each hand, and rounded the 
eyes into perfect circles, and, I regret to say, left the mouth 
out altogether, with perfect satisfaction to himself. 

125. May I without offense ask you to consider whether 
this mode of arrest in ancient Irish art may not be indicative 
of points of character which even yet, in some measure, 
arrest your national power? I have seen much of Irish 
character, and have watched it closely, for I have also much 
loved it. And I think the form of failure to which it is most 
liable is this, that being generous-hearted, and wholly in- 
tending always to do right, it does not attend to the external 
laws of right, but thinks it must necessarily do right because 
it means to do so, and therefore does wrong without finding 
it out; and then when the consequences of its wrong come 
upon it, or upon others connected with it, it cannot conceive 
that the wrong is in anywise of its causing or of its doing, but 
flies into wrath, and a strange agony of desire for justice, as 
feeling itself wholly innocent, which leads it farther astray, 
until there is nothing that it is not capable of doing with a 
good conscience. 

126. But mind, I do not mean to say that, in past or 
present relations between Ireland and England, you have 
been wrong, and we right. Far from that, I believe that in 
all great questions of principle, and in all details of admin- 
istration of law, you have been usually right, and we wrong; 
sometimes in misunderstanding you, sometimes in resolute 



136 SESAME AND LILIES 

iniquity to you. Nevertheless, in all disputes between states, 
though the strongest" is nearly always mainly in the wrong, 
the weaker is often so in a minor degree; and I think we some- 
times admit the possibility of our being in error, and you 
never do. 

127. And now, returning to the broader question, what 
these arts and labors of life have to teach us of its mystery, 
this is the first of their lessons — that the more beautiful the 
art, the more it is essentially the work of people who feel 
themselves wrong; — who are striving for the fulfillment of a 
law, and the grasp of a loveliness, which they have not yet 
attained, which they feel even farther and farther from 
attaining, the more they strive for it. And yet, in still deeper 
sense, it is the work of people who know also that they are 
right. The very sense of inevitable error from their purpose 
marks the perfectness of that purpose, and the continued 
sense of failure arises from the continued opening of the 
eyes more clearly to all the sacredest laws of truth. 

128. This is one lesson. The second is a very plain, and 
greatly precious one, namely: — that whenever the arts and 
labors of life are fulfilled in this spirit of striving against mis- 
rule, and doing whatever we have to do, honorably and 
perfectly, they invariably bring happiness, as much as seems 
possible to the nature of man. In all other paths, by which 
that happiness is pursued, there is disappointment, or 
destruction: for ambition and for passion there is no rest — 
no fruition; the fairest pleasures of youth perish in a dark- 
ness greater than their past light; and the loftiest and purest 
love too often does but inflame the cloud of life with endless 
fire of pain." But, ascending from lowest to highest, through 
every scale of human industry, that industry worthily fol- 
lowed, gives peace. Ask the laborer in the field, at the forge, 
or in the mine; ask the patient, delicate-fingered artisan, or 
the strong-armed, fiery-hearted worker in bronze, and in 
marble, and with the colors of light; and none of these, who 
are true workmen, will ever tell you, that they have found 



MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS 137 

the law of heaven an unkind one — that in the sweat of their 
face they should eat bread, till they return to the ground; 
nor that they ever found it an unrewarded obedience, if, 
indeed, it was rendered faithfully to the command — "What- 
soever thy hand findeth to do — do it with thy might." 

129. These are the two great and constant lessons which 
our laborers teach us of the mystery of life. But there is 
another, and a sadder one, which they cannot teach us, 
which we must read on their tombstones. 

**Do it with thy might." There have been myriads upon 
myriads of human creatures who have obeyed this law — who 
have put every breath and nerve of their being into its toil 
— who have devoted every hour, and exhausted every fac- 
ulty — who have bequeathed their unaccomplished thoughts 
at death — who being dead, have yet spoken, by majesty of 
memory, and strength of example. And, at last, what has 
all this "Might" of humanity accomplished, in six thousand 
years of labor and sorrow.? What has it done? Take the 
three chief occupations and arts of men, one by one, and 
count their achievements. Begin with the first — the lord of 
them all — agriculture. Six thousand years have passed 
since we were set to till the ground, from which we were 
taken. How much of it is tilled.? How much of that which 
is, wisely or well? In the very center and chief garden of 
Europe — where the two forms of parent Christianity have 
had their fortresses — where the noble Catholics of the Forest 
Cantons, and the noble Protestants of the Vaudois valleys, 
have maintained, for dateless ages, their faiths and liberties 
— there the unchecked Alpine rivers " yet run wild in devasta- 
tion: and the marshes, which a few hundred men could redeem 
with a year's labor, still blast their helpless inhabitants into 
fevered idiotism. That is so, in the center of Europe! 
While, on the near coast of Africa, once the Garden of the 
Hesperides, an Arab woman, but a few sunsets since, ate her 
child, for famine. And, with all the treasures of the East at 
our feet, we, in our own dominion, could not find a few grains 



I 



138 SESAME AND LILIES 

of rice, for a people that asked of us no more; but stood by, 
and saw five hundred thousand " of them perish of hunger. 

130. Then, after agriculture, the art of kings, take the next 
head of human arts — weaving; the art of queens, honored 
of all noble Heathen women, in the person of their virgin 
goddess — honored of all Hebrew women, by the word of their 
wisest king — " "She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her 
hands hold the distaff; she stretcheth out her hand to the 
poor. She is not afraid of the snow for her household, for all 
her household are clothed with scarlet. She maketh herself 
covering of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple. She 
maketh fine linen, and selleth it, and delivereth girdles to the 
merchant." What have we done in all these thousands of 
years with this bright art of Greek maid and Christian 
matron? Six thousand years of weaving, and have we 
learned to weave? Might not every naked wall have been 
purple with tapestry, and every feeble breast fenced with 
sweet colors from the cold? What have we done? Our 
fingers are too few, it seems, to twist together some poor 
covering for our bodies. We set our streams to work for 
us, and choke the air with fire, to turn our spinning wheels 
— and, — are we yet clothed? Are not the streets of the 
capitals of Europe foul with sale of cast clouts and rotten 
rags? Is not the beauty of your sweet children left in 
wretchedness of disgrace, while, with better honor, nature 
clothes the brood of the bird in its nest, and the suckling of 
the wolf in her den? And does not every winter's snow 
robe " what you have not robed, and shroud what you have 
not shrouded; and every winter's wind bear up to heaven 
its wasted souls, to witness against you hereafter, by the 
voice of their Christ, — "I was naked, and ye clothed me 
not.?" 

131. Lastly — take the Art of Building — the strongest — 
proudest — most orderly — most enduring of the arts of man; 
that, of which the produce is in the surest manner accumula- 
tive, and need not perish, or be replaced; but if once well 



MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS 139 

done, will stand more strongly than the unbalanced rocks — 
more prevalently than the crumbling hills. The art which is 
associated with all civic pride and sacred principle; with which 
men record their power — satisfy their enthusiasm — make sure 
their defense — define and make dear their habitation. And 
in six thousand years of building, what have we done.? Of 
the greater part of all that skill and strength, no vestige is 
left, but fallen stones, that encumber the fields and impede 
the streams. But, from this waste of disorder, and of time, 
and of rage, what is left to us? Constructive and progres- 
sive creatures, that we are, with ruling brains, and form- 
ing hands, capable of fellowship, and thirsting for fame, can 
we not contend, in comfort, with the insects of the forest, or 
in achievement, with the worm of the sea.? The white surf 
rages in vain against the ramparts built by poor atoms of 
scarcely nascent life; but only ridges of formless ruin mark 
the places where once dwelt our noblest multitudes. The 
ant and the moth have cells for each of their young, but our 
little ones lie in festering heaps, in homes that consume them 
like graves; and night by night, from the corners of our 
streets, rises up the cry of the homeless — '*I was a stranger, 
and ye took me not in.'* 

132. Must it be always thus.? Is our life forever to be 
without profit — without possession.? Shall the strength of 
its generations be as barren as death; or c^iSt away their 
labor, as the wild fig tree casts her untimely figs.? Is it all a 
dream then — the desire of the eyes and the pride of life — or, 
if it be, might we not live in nobler dream than this.? The 
poets and prophets, the wise men, and the scribes, though they 
have told us nothing about a life to come, have told us much 
about the life that is now. They have had — they also, — their 
dreams, and we have laughed at them. They have dreamed 
of mercy, and of justice; they have dreamed of peace 
and good-will; they have dreamed of labor undisappointed, 
and of rest undisturbed; they have dreamed of fullness in 
harvest, and overflowing in store; they have dreamed of 



I40 SESAME AND LILIES 

wisdom in council, and of providence in law; of gladness of 
parents, and strength of children, and glory of gray hairs. 
And at these visions of theirs we have mocked, and held them 
for idle and vain, unreal and unaccomplishable. What have 
we accomplished with our realities? Is this what has come 
of our worldly wisdom, tried against their folly? this, our 
mightiest possible, against their impotent ideal? or, have we 
only wandered among the spectra of a baser felicity, and 
chased phantoms of the tombs, instead of visions of the 
Almighty; and walked after the imaginations of our evil 
hearts, instead of after the counsels of Eternity, until our 
lives — not in the likeness of the cloud of heaven, but of the 
smoke of hell — have become "as a vapor, that appeareth for 
a little time, and then vanisheth away ? " 

133. Does it vanish then? Are you sure of that? — sure, 
that the nothingness of the grave will be a rest from this 
troubled nothingness; and that the coiling shadow, which 
disquiets itself in vain, cannot change into the smoke of the 
torment that ascends forever?" Will any answer that they 
are sure of it, and that there is no fear, nor hope, nor desire, 
nor labor, whither they go? Be it so; will you not, then, 
make as sure of the Life that now is, as you are of the Death 
that is to come? Your hearts are wholly in this world — will 
you not give them to it wisely, as well as perfectly? And see, 
first of all, that you have hearts, and sound hearts, too, to 
give. Because you have no heaven to look for, is that any 
reason that you should remain ignorant of this wonderful 
and infinite earth, which is firmly and instantly given you 
in possession? Although your days are numbered, and the 
following darkness sure, is it necessary that you should share 
the degradation of the brute, because you are condemned to 
its mortality; or live the life of the moth, and of the worm, 
because you are to companion them in the dust? Not so; 
we may have but a few thousands of days to spend, perhaps 
hundreds only — perhaps, tens; nay, the longest of our time 
and best, looked back on, will be but as a moment, as the 



MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS 141 

twinkling of an eye; still, we are men, not insects; we are 
living spirits, not passing clouds. *'He maketh the winds 
His messengers; the momentary fire. His minister; " and 
shall we do less than these? Let us do the work of men 
while we bear the form of them; and, as we snatch our nar- 
row portion of time out of Eternity, snatch also our narrow 
inheritance of passion out of Immortality — even though our 
lives be as a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then 
vanisheth away. 

134. But there are some of you who believe not this — 
who think this cloud of life has no such close — that it is to 
float, revealed and illumined, upon the floor of heaven, in 
the day when He cometh with clouds, and every eye shall see 
Him. Some day, you believe, within these five, or ten, or 
twenty years, for every one of us the judgment will be set, 
and the books opened. If that be true, far more than that 
must be true. Is there but one day of judgment.? Why, 
for us every day is a day of judgment" — every day is a Dies 
Irae, and writes its irrevocable verdict in the flame of its 
West. Think you that judgment waits till the doors of the 
grave are opened .? It waits at the doors of your houses — it 
waits at the corners of your streets; we are in the midst of 
judgment — the insects that we crush are our judges — the 
moments we fret away are our judges — the elements that 
feed us, judge, as they minister — and the pleasures that 
deceive us, judge, as they indulge. Let us, for our lives, do 
the work of Men while we bear the Form of them, if indeed 
those lives are Not as a vapor, and do Not vanish away. 

135. "The work of men" — and what is that.? Well, we 
may any of us know very quickly, on the condition of being 
wholly ready to do it. But many of us are for the most part 
thinking, not of what we are to do, but of what we are to 
get; and the best of us are sunk into the sin of Ananias," 
and it is a mortal one — we want to keep back part of the 
price; and we continually talk of taking up our cross, as if 
the only harm in a cross was the weight of it — as if it was 



142 SESAME AND LILIES 

only a thing to be carried, instead of to be — crucified upon. 
"They that are His have crucified the flesh, with the aff'ec- 
tions and lusts." Does that mean, think you, that in time 
of national distress, of religious trial, of crisis for every 
interest and hope of humanity — none of us will cease jesting, 
none cease idling, none put themselves to any wholesome 
work, none take so much as a tag of lace off their footmen's 
coats, to save the world? Or does it rather mean, that they 
are ready to leave houses, lands, and kindreds — yes, and 
life, if need be? Life! — some of us are ready enough to 
throw that away, joyless as we have made it. But ^'station 
in Life" — how many of us are ready to quit that? Is it not 
always the great objection, where there is question of finding 
something useful to do — "We cannot leave our stations in 
Life"?" 

Those of us who really cannot — that is to say, who can 
only maintain themselves by continuing in some business or 
salaried office, have already something to do; and all that 
they have to see to, is that they do it honestly and with all 
their might. But with most people who use that apology, 
"remaining in the station of life to which Providence has 
called them," means keeping all the carriages, and all the 
footmen and large houses they can possibly pay for; and, 
once for all, I say that if ever Providence did put them into 
stations of that sort — which is not at all a matter of certainty 
— Providence is just now very distinctly calling them out 
again. Levi's " station in life was the receipt of custom; and 
Peter's," the shore of Galilee; and Paul's," the antechambers 
of the High Priest, — which "station in life" each had to 
leave, with brief notice. 

And, whatever our station in life may be, at this crisis, 
those of us who mean to fulfill our duty ought, first, to live 
on as little as we can; and, secondly, to do all the wholesome 
work for it we can, and to spend all we can spare in doing 
all the sure good we can. 

And sure good " is first in feeding people, then in dressing 



MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS 1 43 

people, then in lodging people, and lastly in rightly pleasing 
people, with arts, or sciences, or any other subject of thought. 

136. I say first in feeding; and, once for all, do not let 
yourselves be deceived by any of the common talk of "in- 
discriminate charity." The order to us is not to feed the 
deserving hungry, nor the industrious hungry, nor the ami- 
able and well-intentioned hungry, but simply to feed the 
hungry. It is quite true, infallibly true, that if any man 
will not work, neither should he eat — think of that," and 
every time you sit down to your dinner, ladies and gentle- 
men, say solemnly, before you ask a blessing, "How much 
work have I done to-day for my dinner.?" But the proper 
way to enforce that order on those below you, as well as on 
yourselves, is not to leave vagabonds and honest people to 
starve together, but very distinctly to discern and seize your 
vagabond; and shut your vagabond up out of honest people's 
way, and very sternly then see that, until he has worked, he 
does not eat. But the first thing is to be sure you have the 
food to give; and, therefore, to enforce the organization of 
vast activities in agriculture and in commerce, for the pro- 
duction of the wholesomest food, and proper storing and 
distribution of it, so that no famine shall any more be pos- 
sible among civilized beings. There is plenty of work in this 
business alone, and at once, for any number of people who 
like to engage in it. 

137. Secondly, dressing people — that is to say, urging 
everyone within reach of your influence to be always neat 
and clean, and giving them means of being so. In so far as 
they absolutely refuse, you must give up the effort with 
respect to them, only taking care that no children within 
your sphere of influence shall any more be brought up with 
such habits; and that every person who is willing to dress 
with propriety shall have encouragement to do so. And 
the first absolutely necessary step towards this is the gradual 
adoption of a consistent dress for diff'erent ranks of persons, 
so that their rank shall be known by their dress; and the 



144 SESAME AND LILIES 

restriction of the changes of fashion within certain limits. 
All which appears for the present quite impossible; but it is 
only so far as even difficult as it is difficult to conquer our 
vanity, frivolity, and desire to appear what we are not. And 
it is not, nor ever shall be, creed of mine, that these mean 
and shallow vices are unconquerable by Christian women. 

138. And then, thirdly, lodging people, which you may 
think should have been put first, but I put it third, because 
we must feed and clothe people where we find them, and 
lodge them afterwards. And providing lodgment for them 
means a great deal of vigorous legislation, and cutting down 
of vested interests that stand in the way, and after that, or 
before that, so far as we can get it, thorough sanitary and 
remedial action in the houses that we have; and then the 
building of more, strongly, beautifully, and in groups of 
limited extent, kept in proportion to their streams, and 
walled round, so that there may be no festering and wretched 
suburb anywhere, but clean and busy street within, and the 
open country without, with a belt of beautiful garden and 
orchard round the walls, so that from any part of the city 
perfectly fresh air and grass, and sight of far horizon might 
be reachable in a few minutes' walk. This the final aim; 
but in immediate action every minor and possible good to be 
instantly done, when, and as, we can; roofs mended that have 
holes in them — fences patched that have gaps in them — 
walls buttressed that totter — and floors propped that shake; 
cleanliness and order enforced with our own hands and eyes, 
till we are breathless, every day. And all the fine arts will 
healthily follow. I myself have washed a flight of stone 
stairs all down, with bucket and broom, in a Savoy inn, 
where they hadn't washed their stairs since they first went 
up them; and I never made a better sketch than that after- 
noon. 

139. These, then, are the three first needs of civilized life; 
and the law for every Christian man and woman is, that 
they shall be in direct service towards one of these three 



MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS 145 

needs, as far as is consistent with their own special occupa- 
tion, and if they have no special business, then wholly in 
one of these services. And out of such exertion in plain 
duty all other good will come; for in this direct contention 
with material evil, you will find out the real nature of all 
evil; you will discern by the various kinds of resistance, what 
is really the fault and main antagonism to good; also you 
will find the most unexpected helps and profound lessons 
given, and truths will come thus down to us which the spec- 
ulation of all our lives would never have raised us up to. 
You will find nearly every educational problem solved, as 
soon as you truly want to do something; everybody will 
become of use in their" own fittest way, and will learn what 
is best for them to know in that use. Competitive exam- 
ination will then, and not till then, be wholesome, because 
it will be daily, and calm, and in practice; and on these 
familiar arts, and minute, but certain and serviceable, 
knowledges, will be surely edified and sustained the greater 
arts and splendid theoretical sciences. 

140. But much more than this. On such holy and simple 
practice will be founded, indeed, at last, an infallible religion. 
The greatest of all the mysteries of life, and the most terrible, 
is the corruption of even the sincerest religion, which is not 
daily founded on rational, effective, humble, and helpful 
action." Helpful action, observe! for there is just one law, 
which, obeyed, keeps all religions pure— forgotten, makes 
them all false. Whenever in any religious faith, dark or 
bright, we allow our minds to dwell upon the points in which 
we differ from other people, we are wrong, and in the devil's 
power. That is the essence of the Pharisee's thanksgiving— 
"Lord, I thank thee that I am not as other men are." At 
every moment of our lives we should be trying to find out, 
not in what we differ from other people, but in what we 
agree with them; and the moment we find we can agree as to 
anything that should be done, kind or good (and who but 
fools couldn't?) then do it; push at it together; you cant 



146 SESAME AND LILIES 

quarrel in a side-by-side push; but the moment that even 
the best men stop pushing, and begin talking, they mistake 
their pugnacity for piety, and it's all over. I will not speak 
of the crimes which in past times have been committed in 
the name of Christ, nor of the follies which are at this hour 
held to be consistent with obedience to Him; but I will speak 
of the morbid corruption and waste of vital power in religious 
sentiment, by which the pure strength of that which should 
be the guiding soul of every nation, the splendor of its youth- 
ful manhood, and spotless light of its maidenhood, is averted 
or cast away. You may see continually girls who have never 
been taught to do a single useful thing thoroughly; who can- 
not sew, who cannot cook, who cannot cast an account, nor 
prepare a medicine, whose whole life has been passed either 
in play or in pride; you will find girls like these, when they 
are earnest-hearted, cast all their innate passion of religious 
spirit, which was meant by God to support them through 
the irksomeness of daily toil, into grievous and vain medita- 
tion over the meaning of the great Book, of which no syllable 
was ever yet to be understood but through a deed; all the 
instinctive wisdom and mercy of their womanhood made 
vain, and the glory of their pure consciences warped into 
fruitless agony concerning questions which the laws of com- 
mon serviceable life would have either solved for them in an 
instant, or kept out of their way. Give such a girl any true 
work that will make her active in the dawn, and weary at 
night, with the consciousness that her fellow-creatures have 
indeed been the better for her day, and the powerless sorrow 
of her enthusiasm will transform itself into a majesty of radi- 
ant and beneficent peace. 

So with our youths. We once taught them to make Latin 
verses, and called them educated; now we teach them to 
leap and to row, to hit a ball with a bat,^ and call them 
educated. Can they plow, can they sow, can they plant at 
the right time, or build with a steady hand? Is it the effort 
of their lives to be chaste, knightly, faithful, holy in thought, 



MYSTERY OF LIFE AND ITS ARTS 147 

lovely in word and deed? " Indeed it is, with some, nay with 
many, and the strength of England is in them, and the hope; 
but we have to turn their courage from the toil of war to the 
toil of mercy; and their intellect from dispute of words to 
discernment of things; and their knighthood from the er- 
rantry of adventure to the state and fidelity of a kingly 
power. And then, indeed, shall abide, for them and for us, 
an incorruptible felicity, and an infallible religion; shall abide 
for us Faith, no more to be assailed by temptation, no more 
to be defended by wrath and by fear; — shall abide with us 
Hope, no more to be quenched by the years that overwhelm, 
or made ashamed by the shadows that betray; — shall abide 
for us, and with us, the greatest of these; the abiding will, 
the abiding name, of our Father. For the greatest of these 
is Charity. 



NOTES 

(The figures In heavy type refer to the page.) 

21. wholly mistaken. Ruskin's characteristic severity where 
fault or error was concerned lost none of its sting when it happened 
to be his own error that he was to condemn. He had broken away 
from the Calvinistic faith in 1858. 

22. full of pain. Ruskin had little or no conception, apparently, 
of the great fruit of his teachings, even of that which ripened during 
his lifetime, physically injurious form. The reader is repeatedly 
struck with the distinct modernness of Ruskin's notions. 

23. modem political economy. Ruskin abominated the doctrines 
of political economy then current, whose chief exponent was John 
Stuart Mill. 

24. His own nature and character. See § 73, and note on same. 

25. Idleness and Cruelty. Here, as in many other instances, a 
single sentence from Ruskin will scarcely bear the test of truth. 
old people never tell. Of course, many, If not most parents do tell 
their children, time and time again, how precious youth is. Ruskin's, 
we must suppose, did not; hence he Indulges his habit of making a 
dogmatic statement about something concerning which he knows 
very little. 

27. ministries . . . present. Much like our visiting nurses, use- 
ful clothing. Compare this with our courses In domestic science. 

28. saved by . . . lost by His Improvidence. Our author's way 
of stating one of the chief doctrines of Calvinism. 

29. I thank thee. Luke 18: 11. meat and drink. Romans 14: 17. 

30. joy in a dance. See note on page 34. one girl. Rose La 
Touche. one. Mrs. Cowper Temple, not Rose La Touche, as has 
frequently been stated. See E. T. Cook, Life of John Ruskin, II, 272. 

31. I might myself have been. See Introduction, p. 8. Guide 

149 



150 NOTES 

Guinicelli. (i 240-1 276.) Italian poet, whose poems deal exclu- 
sively with love. His later poetry was remarkable for the beauty 
of its imagery. Dante esteemed him the father of Italian poetry. 
His best-known poem is The Gentle Heart, of which there is an ex- 
cellent translation by Ruskin's friend, D. G. Rossetti. Guinicelli 
was banished as a Ghibelline in 1274. (Jean Francois) Marmontel. 
(1723-1799.) French writer, friend of Voltaire and Madame de 
Pompadour. His chief work was a political novel, Belisaire (1767), 
which brought him into conflict with the Jesuits. He was secretary 
of the French Academy, and histriographer of France. 

32. Dean (Jonathan) Swift. (1667-1745). Irish satirist, and 
Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. His greatest work was 
Gulliver's Travels, probably the keenest satire ever written on Eng- 
lish court and political life, from whose caprices and injustices Swift 
had suffered. His Journal to Stella was written for Esther Johnson, 
the girl whom he loved, and whom he is, by some, thought to have 
married secretly. He was loved by Hester Vanhomrigh, and shortly 
after Swift broke with her she died. About 1736 his mind began to 
weaken, and the last few years of his life were spent in unrelieved 
misery. It is seriously to be questioned whether the statement of 
the influences affecting Ruskin's life is either fair or true. He was 
at the time (1871) deeply discouraged, and it is entirely possible 
that the bitterness and the struggles that entered into all three of 
these lives, and the romances in at least two of them, swayed his 
judgment when this was written. Certain it is that we find almost 
no trace of Swift's style in Ruskin; and in other places in his writings, 
speaking of forces that have shaped his life and work, he fails to 
mention these men at all, speaking rather of the Bible, Shakespeare, 
Scott, Homer, Byron, and Bunyan. 

33. Sesame and Lilies is a good example of the puzzling titles Rus- 
kin gave to many of his books. Some of his English critics professed 
themselves unable to see any meaning in the phrase. A certain 
American humorist observed, "There is one good thing about one 
of Ruskin's books: when you know its title, you know at least one 
thing the book is not about." However, we may safely say that 
Sesame is used in a somewhat double sense. It is the name of a 



NOTES 151 

grain used for food by Eastern peoples, and hence signifies "worth" 
or "treasure." It also occurs in the magic phrase, "Open Sesame," 
which opened the door to the robbers' treasure cave in the Arabian 
Nights story, AH Baba and the Forty Thieves; hence "Sesame" 
may likewise mean a key, or password, to the treasures of literature. 
The title of the second lecture, the world and life (gardens) of 
women, in which grow pure, beautiful thoughts and deeds, need not 
puzzle us. The first lecture was given in aid of a library fund for 
Rusholme Institute, December 6, 1864, at Rusholme Town Hall, 
Manchester. Lucian (120-200), greatest Greek writer of the Chris- 
tian era. The line is from one of his Dialogues. The sesame is 
offered as a bait to the philosopher. 

34. some connection with schools. Ruskin was officially con- 
nected with schools as follows: 1858, Professor in School of Art, 
Cambridge; 1867, Rede lecturer in Cambridge University; 1869- 
1879 and 1 883-1 885, Slade Professor of Fine Arts, Oxford Univer- 
sity. At the time of this lecture (1864), he was teaching drawing in 
the Working Men's College. He was also, for ten or fifteen years, a 
regular visitor at the Girls' School at Winnington, where he gave the 
pupils lessons in drawing, dancing, crystallography, and other sub- 
jects. It was for these girls he wrote Ethics of the Dust. He was 
always interested in educational subjects, and gave many lectures 
for students' organizations, double-belled doors. In some houses 
in England, doors have two bells, — one for visitors and one for 
tradesmen. 

35. the last infirmity of noble minds. See Milton's Lycidas, 
lines 70-84. greatest efforts . . . pleasure. This is one of those 
broad, sweeping statements that Ruskin so frequently made, all 
through his life. Like many of his others, it is scarcely capable of 
proof, yet he tosses it off as though it had been long settled, mortal. 
From Lat. mors, "death." My Lord. In England the bishops 
are so called because they are "Lords Spiritual" of Parlia- 
ment. 

36. Political Economy. Ruskin's writings on political economy 
are: Unto this Last, four essays; Munera Pulveris, six essays; The 
Crown of Wild Olive, three essays; Fors Clavigera; Letters to Workmen 



152 NOTES 

and Laborers of Great Britain. The essential theme of all this teach- 
ing was: "There is no wealth but life." In 1857 he had written The 
Political Economy of Art, thus indicating the trend of his genius at 
that time. 

37. tertiary, "third-rate." collateral. Subordinately connected, 
truisms. Perhaps one he may have had in mind is, "Birds of a 
feather flock together." when we most need them. Compare, 
from Browning's poem, Never the Time and the Place: 

"Never the time and the place 
And the loved one all together!" 

38. a society. Ruskin has now begun the body of his essay. 
Note the beauty of this approach, determined. Look up the der- 
ivation of this word. 

39. ephemeral. Look up the derivation, before I go farther. 
Note here the perfect assurance with which Ruskin sets out to 
perform this difficult task. It was the too great apparent con- 
fidence in himself in the face of insurmountable difficulties — the 
being "sure he was right," that, more than anything else, estranged 
people from him. When we stop to think of it, we see that books can 
not arbitrarily be put into these four pigeonholes, and made to 
stay there. Some "lively or pathetic story-telling in the form of 
novel" has lived through the ages. Mother Goose rimes appear to 
be utter nonsense; yet they live. But Ruskin does not ask us to 
agree with him; he merely asks us to make sure we understand him; 
he then wants us to think the thing out fairly for ourselves. 

40. engrave it on rock. Compare Job: "Graven with an iron 
pen and lead in a rock forever." All Ruskin's writings are filled 
and colored with Bible phraseology. His mother saw to it that he 
read the Bible through many times, skipping nothing, and he tells 
us that this affected his style more profoundly than anything else. 
He committed to memory nineteen chapters and eight Psalms. 
He had the habit late in life of starting each day's work by reading a 
chapter word for word, as he advises us to do with any great book, in 
§§ I3~23. those are the book. Ruskin thought his Unto This Last 
the "truest, rightest worded" of his own books, and predicted that 



NOTES 153 

it, "if any," of his books, would live. Queen of the Air. § 106 
(Footnote). "Of course art-gift and amiability of disposition are 
two different things; a good man is not necessarily a painter, nor 
does an eye for color necessarily imply an honest mind. But great 
art implies the union of both powers: it is the expression, by an 
art-gift, of a pure soul. If the gift is not there, we can have no art at 
all; and if a soul — and a right soul, too, — is not there, the art is bad, 
however dexterous." 

41. entree. The privilege of entering as a guest. Dead. Com- 
pare: 

"There studious let me sit 
And hold high converse with the mighty dead." 

Thomson's Seasons. "Winter." 

Elysian. In Greek mythology, the entrance to the abodes of the 
blessed dead, portieres means "gates" or "doors." Faubourg St. 
Germain. An aristocratic section of historic Paris. 

42. his meaning. Compare § 122, and note that Ruskin must 
have had himself in mind, in a hidden way. In this section Ruskin 
expounds his somewhat unique theories regarding reading and 
books. Stated boldly and unequivocally (as he usually states any- 
thing he has to say) they at first repel us. We naturally want to 
do some thinking of our own as we read. Ruskin is perfectly willing 
that we should think; but he insists that our thoughts should wait 
until those of the author have been thoroughly grasped. And here 
again his doctrine is affected by his own case; for it certainly is 
necessary to read a lecture of Ruskin's through^ before the meaning 
of any particular passage can be fairly judged. Single statements 
of his are frequently unwarranted and misleading. They must be 
understood as contributing to the whole, not as being infallible 
themselves. See, for instance, his sweeping statement about edu- 
cated men and their pronunciation, § 15. Then, second, this "hid- 
den way," or "cruel reticence" theory regarding authors has brought 
down on him much severe criticism. Is it not the business of an 
author to make himself clear? What does Ruskin mean, then, by 
saying that great writers follow the opposite plan? Perhaps he is 



154 NOTES 

decrying what we call "obvious" writing, which is so shallow that 
it utterly fails to stimulate the reader's thought or imagination. 
Or, possibly, great authors write as clearly as they can, and the 
reason it is hard to understand them is that the matters they. deal 
with are deep and difficult in themselves. In other words, Ruskin 
may be wrong about their being purposely "reticent." Is Ruskin 
ever purposely obscure — in his books or in his titles.'' gold. He is 
probably carrying out the metaphor of the title. 

43. know. He clearly implies that he is not sure he is right in some 
of the theories he has been propounding. One of the tricks in reading 
him is to discover when he is most in earnest, and when, on the other 
hand, he is a trifle speculative and whimsical. It is not at all easy, 
for he nearly always states things with apparent conviction, litera- 
ture. See derivation. 

44. accuracy. Compare: §§74-75. canaille. Lat. r^wu, "dog." 
Fr. (literally), "a pack of dogs." Used by the French nobility to 
designate the common people. noblesse. "Nobility." Latin 
quantity. English education, particularly forty years ago, was 
based far more generally on study of the classics than is school work 
in this country. 

45. chameleon cloaks. The chameleon is a species of lizard, whose 
color appears to become the same as that of the objects near it. 
This hatred of cant, shown all through § 16, is expressed by many 
authors. See, for instance, Holmes's Autocrat, eleventh paper, im- 
mediately following "The Deacon's Masterpiece." unjust stew- 
ards. Luke 16: 1-5. 

46. steam press. Recall Ruskin's antipathy to the use of steam 
and coal as impairing beauty, choked. Matthew 13: 3-8. vulgar. 
See derivation, condemn. Many of us must feel that Ruskin is here 
making useless warfare on a habit that is too deep-seated to be com- 
bated. Words, especially translated words, take on new and special 
meanings when new conditions arise. Scarcely anyone means 
the same thing by damn and condemn to-day. The former means 
more commonly "to curse"; the latter, "to denounce." But the 
whole thought, as usual, is sound: What a gain in precision there 
would be, both in speech and thought, did we but note the derivation 



NOTES 155 

of the words we use. divisions in the mind of Europe. The Refor- 
mation. Were these struggles caused by disputes over words, or 
were there, as Ruskin himself hints, "deeper causes"? ecclesia. 
This Greek word originally meant any public meeting; our adjec- 
tive "ecclesiastical," made directly from the Greek noun, has 
taken on a special meaning, and refers only to affairs of the 
church. 

47. Nearly every word. This statement is true only in a deeply 
philological sense. As we ordinarily use the term "origin," ninety 
per cent of Shakespeare's words, eighty-one per cent of Mil- 
ton's, and eighty-eight per cent of Tennyson's are of native origin. 
Max Miiller. (1823 -1900.) Philologist, born in Germany; for 
many years a professor at Oxford. The lectures here referred to 
were on The Science of Language, and were given at Oxford during 
the three years preceding the delivery of Sesame. 

48. Lycidas. Milton's elegy, written (1637) on the death of his 
college friend, Edward King. Compare Tennyson's In Memoriam, 
depicting the author's soul struggles following the loss of his friend, 
Arthur Hallam. pilot. Matthew 4: 18-22. keys. Matthew 16: 
18-22. mitered. The miter Is the bishop's hat. fold. See Paradise 
Lost, IV, 192. bidden guest. Matthew 22: 3, 8, 9. recks it them. 
"What do they care.'*" are sped, "are cared for." flashy songs. 
Compare Bacon's essay. On Studies: "Some books may be read by 
deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but . . . distilled 
books are like common distilled waters, flashy things." scrannel. 
"Thin" or "screeching." no Bishop-lover. Milton was a Puritan. 
How did the Puritans regard bishops.^ 

49. to the flock, i Peter 5:3. 

50. broken metaphor. Mixed metaphor, office. See derivation; 
also of "bishop" and "pastor." See also Chaucer's Idea of various 
church people, especially the Pardoner and the Poure Parsoun 
{Prologue to the Canterbury Tales) ; and Goldsmith's, in The Deserted 
Village. Bill, and Nancy. Bill Sykes and Nancy, from Dickens's 
Oliver Twist. Ruskin and his parents were fond of reading Dickens 
together, but the former never cared particularly for Thackeray or 
George Eliot. See also § 77. 



156 NOTES 

51. Salisbury steeple is probably the highest in England, grim 
wolf. John 10: 12-13. See also Milton's Sonnet to Cromwell: 

"Help us to save free conscience from the paw 
Of hireling wolves." 

swoln with wind. Compare Hamlet's reply to the King: "I eat 
the air, promise-crammed. You cannot feed capons so." And what 
of our slang phrase, "hot air"."^ Spirit. John 3: 8. Time and Tide. 
(Footnote.) The thirteenth letter in Time and Tide reads: "A 
bishop's duty being to watch over the souls of his people, and give 
account of every one of them, it becomes practically necessary for 
him first to give some account of their bodies. . . . Over every 
hundred of the families composing a Christian state, there should be 
appointed an overseer, or bishop, to render account, to the state, of 
the life of every individual in those families, and to have care both 
of their interest and conduct ... so that it may be impossible for 
any person, however humble, to suffer from unknown want, to live 
in unrecognized crimes." 

52. cretinous. From "cretin," a deformed and hopeless idiot. 
thinking rightly. Ruskin had a deep-seated hatred of overemphasis 
of creed, particularly after the year 1858. without water. Jude 12. 
Dante. (1265-13 21.) The greatest Italian poet. Milton was born 
in 1608, just eight years before Shakespeare died. §§ 24 and 25 
contain many references to the works of these three poets, particu- 
larly to Richard III and Henry VIII, as well as the Inferno and 
Lycidas. both the keys. "From beneath that (vestment) he 
draws two keys. One was of gold and the other was of silver; first 
with the white and then with the yellow he so did to the door that 
I was content." Dante, The Divine Comedy, Purgatory, from Canto 
IX. (Translated by Norton.) key. 1^^^11:52. 

63. also himself. Proverbs 11: 25. rock-apostle. Peter. Mat- 
thew 16: 18. hand and foot. Matthew 22: 13. no serious impor- 
tance. Again you are at first repelled by what seems like an affront; 
but read the passage through, before throwing it down. 

54. mix the music. From Emerson's To Rhea. This writer. 



NOTES 157 

Literary critics would not agree with that estimate to-day. Per- 
haps other people might. 

55. St. Francis (i 182-1226), founder of the Franciscan order 
of friars. St. Dominic (1170-1221), of the Dominicans, Dante 
gives them exalted places in his Paradise, him who made Vergil won- 
der. Caigphas, the high priest; see John 11: 49-50; 18: 13-14. 
Vergil (70-19 B. C.) was Dante's guide through the Inferno, him 
whom Dante stood beside. Pope Nicholas III, who, Dante says, 
was suffering punishment for selling pardons. Alighieri. Dante's 
family name, fallow ground. Jeremiah 4: 3. 

56. Passion. "Sensation"; see derivation, society of the Dead. 

"My days among the dead are passed; 

Around me I behold 
Where'er the casual eyes are cast, 

The mighty minds of old; 
My never-failing friends are they. 

With whom I converse day by day. 
My Days among the Dead are Passed. Southey. 

vulgar. See the derivation of "vulgar," "sensitive," and "tact." 
Mimosa. The sensitive plant, whose leaves shrink and fold when 
touched. — Ruskin is trying to show that Shakespeare and Dante 
painted men as they are, regardless of the author's personal beliefs. 
In his works on painting, his main thesis is that the business of the 
artist is to paint Nature as she is. 

57. the great river. David Livingstone returned in 1864 from a 
trip of exploration in Africa. In 1858-59 he had sought the source 
of the Zambezi. River of Life. Revelation 22: I. look into. 
I Peter i: 12. junketings. "Picnics" or "feasts." 

58. without an effort. Referring probably to the conquering of 
Poland by Russia, or to England's refusal to help Garibaldi to free 
Italy from Austria, price of cotton. The reference is of course to 
our Civil War. Ruskin had no sympathy with the North in this 
struggle, but it distressed him to see his countrymen concerned only 
with the material aspects of the conflict, the cannon's mouth. 
The Opium War (1840), in which England forced the Chinese Em- 



158 NOTES 

peror to allow the sale of the drug in China, in spite of his desire to 
protect his people from the terrible effects of the drug, is one of the 
darkest stains on English history. 

69. perplex'd i' the extreme. From Othello, v, 2: 

"Then must you speak 
Of one that lov'd not wisely but too well; 
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought 
Perplex'd in the extreme." 

bayoneting young girls. Probably a reference to the Syrian mas- 
sacres of 1860-61. love of money, i Timothy 6: 10. intelligible to 
them. About four years before this, Ruskin had published the 
four essays now called Unto this Last, in CornhilPs Magazine, 
edited by Thackeray. Note how the English people received 
them, and judge whether or not he may have had himself in 
mind. 

60. Samaritan. Luke 10: 30-35. scorpion whips. 11 Chronicles 
10: II. money-making mob. Ruskin never could tolerate avarice. 
He gave away most of the large fortune left him by his father, and 
he never wrote with the idea of tickling the popular fancy. Besides, 
he refused, until late in life, to allow his books to be sold in popular 
priced editions. Compare on page 61, his statement: "No book is 
worth anything which is not worth much^ bibliomaniac. One who 
is insane about books. 

61. loaves. Matthew 14. circulating libraries. Perhaps Ruskin's 
wealth accounts in part for his impatience with circulating libraries 
and his inability to see any good in them. 

62. observatory. The Royal Observatory at Greenwich, any- 
body . . . their. Ruskin shared the common English habit of using 
the plural pronoun after "anybody," "anyone," etc. Happily, that 
habit has not spread to careful American writers, a portion for 
foxes. Better to appreciate the satire here, read Psalms 63 : 10. love 
of science. Note the sarcasm in this paragraph. It comes as close to 
humor as anything in these essays. Note the reference to the 
British Museum (the most notable, probably, as to its collections 
of books, rare manuscripts, relics, etc., in the world) and to the 



NOTES 159 

parliamentary conception of it as "a place for keeping stuffed birds 
in, to amuse our children." 

63. Professor Owen. (Footnote.) Sir Richard Owen. (1804- 
1892.) Superintendent of the natural history departments, British 
Museum. 

64. Ludgate apprentices. Ludgate Hill is the name of a street 
in London, along which are. situated several small shops which de- 
pend largely upon tourist trade, absolutely. See derivation. 
Austrian guns. This is a reference to a deplorable incident in the 
siege of Venice by Austria in 1849, during which some paintings by 
Tintoretto (whom Ruskin particularly admired) were ruined. 
national love of Art. Note the summary manner of this concluding 
sentence. Imagine its effect on an audience, coming at the close of 
so severe an indictment as Ruskin's. In which of these five criti- 
cisms is he at his best.'* You would expect him to be most at home 
in his discussion of art, but he probably thought the last, compassion, 
strongest. Schaffhausen. It was near here that Ruskin caught his 
first glimpse of the Alps, and he always had a peculiar affection fpr 
the spot, writing of it passionately in both Modern Painters and 
Prceterita. Tell's chapel on the Swiss lake. Lucerne, the shore where 
stands the castle of Chillon (see Byron's poem), and the vale of 
Chamonix, were all sacred to our author, and it rent his heart to 
know that English tourists visited these scenes with blind eyes 
and cold hearts; that they could look with complacency on the dese- 
cration of nature's beauties there; and that they could spoil the 
beautiful garden spots of their own island with ugly factories and 
smoke-belching railways. 

65. your own poets. Particularly Wordsworth, Shelley, and 
Coleridge, vineyards. Isaiah 5: 2. 

66. in red. The extract quoted was printed in red in the English 
edition of Sesame and Lilies. Spitalfields. A manufacturing district 
of London, whose chief industry is silk making, articles of dress. 
In St. George's Guild, Ruskin sought to regulate the manner of 
dress of the members. (See p. 12.) 

67. 10s. About $2.50. get the stones. Be put to breaking stones, 
as a convict. The certain passage is Matthew 7: 9. 



l6o NOTES 

68. house. The workhouse. 

69. Satanellas, — Roberts, — Fausts. Light operas of the day, in 
which one of the characters was the devil. 

70. Dio. Italian for God. plain English word or deed. Ruskin 
seems to have in mind, throughout this passage, some such hu- 
manitarian legislation as an "Old Age Pension Law," now an ac- 
complished fact in England, property man. The employee of the 
theater who looks after the stage "properties," or equipment for a 
play. Lazarus. Luke i6. never thank them. What is wrong with 
the grammar of this sentence.^ In what clause is thank, and what is 
its subject.'* 

71. idolatrous Jews. Ezekiel 8: 7-12. Chalmers. Rev. Thomas 
Chalmers (i 780-1 847), a famous Scotch minister. 

72. a great baby. Ruskin was avowedly Tory by birth and be- 
lief, and shared the Tory distrust of popular wisdom; but note care- 
fully that he did not share the common Tory indifference towards 
the common people. Read the last sentences of § 40, in the light of 
all the preceding sarcasm. Does not the analogy strike you as being 
about the fairest, clearest statement in the lecture so far.'' Note how 
ingeniously we are brought back to our theme of books, great 
painters. J. M. W. Turner. (1775-185 1.) See Introduction. 
Kirkby Lonsdale. A village of England, picturesquely located 
in Westmoreland County. 

73. one of us. Compare this whole passage with Isaiah 14: 4-23. 
magnanimous. See derivation, advance in life. See §3. Scythian 
honor. In Proeterita, Ruskin tells how he was early impressed 
by tales of the Scythians, told by Herodotus. Caina. The por- 
tion of Dante's hell where traitors and murderers are submerged, 
except for their heads, in ice. 

74. elsewhere. Munera Pukeris, § 122. people-eating. An epi- 
thet applied by Achilles, the Grecian hero, to Agamemnon, leader 
of the Grecian expedition against the Trojans, during their quarrel 
over Trojan captives, true kings. The following, from Prcetenta, 
is an oftquoted passage: "From my own chosen masters, then, Scott 
and Homer, I learned the Toryism which my best afterthought has 
only served to confirm. That is to say, a most sincere love of kings, 



NOTES l6l 

and dislike of everybody who attempted to disobey them. Only, 
both by Homer and Scott, I was taught strange ideas about kings, 
which I find for the present much obsolete; for I perceived that 
both the author of the Iliad and the author of Waverley made their 
kings or king-loving persons do harder work than anybody else. 
Tydides or Idomeneus always killed twenty Trojans to other 
people's one, and Redgauntlet speared more salmon than any of 
the Solway fishermen, and — what was particularly a subject of 
admiration to me — I observed that they not only did more, but in 
proportion to their doings, got less than other people, — nay, that 
the best of them were even ready to govern for nothing! and let 
their followers divide any quantity of spoil or profit." il gran 
rifiuto. The great refusal, or abdication, to . . • dprjvt]. (Foot- 
note.) Romans 8:6. "To be spiritually minded is life and peace." 
76. Trent. See Henry IV, Part i, iii, 2. Trent is a river in Eng- 
land, cantel. A detached portion. Come. Matthew S: g. do and 
teach. Matthew 5: 19. moth and the rust. Matthew 6: 19-20. 
Fourth . . . treasure. Wisdom. Job 28. Delphian cliffs. On 
Mt. Parnassus; scene of the famed Delphic oracle. 

76. bayonet exercise. The student will enjoy reading the essay 
on war in The Crown of Wild Olive, particularly the first third of the 
essay, noting the passage where the destruction of fields and men 
is compared with their cultivation and education. Read, also, Long- 
fellow's Arsenal at Springfield, only book. Unto this Last. 

77. terror, a year. 

"Were half the power that fills the world with terror. 
Were half the wealth, bestowed on camps and courts. 
Given to redeem the human mind from error. 
There were no need of arsenals or forts." 

Longfellow. The Arsenal at Springfield. 

78. robbers. Note the return to the Forty Thieves, to round 
out the theme. The student should note the sweep and beauty 
with which the lecture is brought to a close in §§ 47-50. Ruskin Is 
striving to awaken his country and her rulers to their spiritual 
needs. He recognizes that the repeal of the corn laws, resulting in 



i62 NOTES 

lowering the price of bread, was good; but he wants to see a wider 
dissemination of spiritual food among the people of the empire: 
he wants a quickening of the national conscience, a new birth of the 
national soul. 

79. crooked spine. The foregoing passage is one of the clearest 
statements in literature to the effect that mere laws cannot make 
conditions what they should be. 

80. clowns. Workmen. See Hamlet v, i. sacrifice of . . . life. 
What does Ruskin say of the responsibilities of this one individual 
who has been so produced.'* 

81. Septuagint. The Greek version of the Old Testament, in 
the first. For the author's summary of the first lecture, see § 4 of 
the Preface. We shall have to admit that he is far clearer and more 
satisfactory in his discussion of how to read than he is in indicating 
zvhat we should read. For why we should ready see the first four lines 
of § 53- kingly. Keep in mind the conception of a king as being 
great, just, wise, efficient, and unselfish, kingly crown. Milton's 
Paradise Lost, 11,673. 

82. kingship. Compare Portia's speech on mercy. Merchant of 
Venice, iv. Not . . . sphere. Once in a while Ruskin indulges 
in a verbless "sentence." You will find two or three other sentences 
in this lecture that will hardly pass muster grammatically, in the 
very outset. With this paragraph the body of the essay begins. 
The student will easily note three main lines of thought: i. Woman's 
ordinary power. 2. The proper education to fit her for her usual life. 
3. Her influence in larger affairs outside the home. 

83. by a slave. Read the conversation between Brutus and Portia 
in Julius CcBsar, 11, i, and compare her notion of wifely duties and 
rights with Ruskin's. repeat. See § 25. 

84. no heroes. Ruskin must have misread some plays and novels, 
read others hastily, and unconsciously warped the meaning of others 
to prove his point; in other words, he must have argued his own 
meanings into these books — the very thing he tells us not to do. 
Let us look at some familiar characters: Why did not Portia, when 
it came time to sentence Shylock, show the same mercy towards him 
that she had urged him to show towards Antonio? What of Gertrude, 



NOTES 163 

Hamlet's mother, largely a cause of his downfall? What of Portia, 
wife of Brutus, who, "her attendants being absent, swallowed fire"? 
Are these "heroic figures," applying to them the same standards 
of heroism that Ruskin applies to men? As for Henry V, he is 
surely more than a "slight sketch." "There is not one entirely 
heroic figure in his plays." If by "entirely heroic" he means perfect^ 
of course there is not. Perfect men do not have tragedies. The 
essence of tragedy, as we commonly use the term in English, is 
failure and destruction through some flaw, or through some unfitness 
of the Individual for his life task. Nobody ever yet centered a 
tragedy about a perfect man or woman. But no doubt Ruskin would 
say: "I did not ask you to agree with me. Your * opinions' are of no 
interest to me at this time. I want you to know how these writings 
impress me. All I ask is that you read me through and get my whole 
thought. Maybe there is something in my impressions worth your 
study." Read in this light, his criticism has done and will do much 
to make people appreciate the women of the classics. Cordelia, 
etc. Cordelia, daughter of Lear; Desdemona, wife of Othello; 
Isabella, Measure for Measure; Hermione, wife of Leontes, and 
Perdita, daughter of Leontes, The Winter's Tale; Imogen, heroine 
in Cymheline; Queen Katharine, King Henry the Eighth (first wife of 
the king); Silvia, Two Gentlemen of Verona; Viola, Twelfth Night; 
Helena, AlVs Well that Ends Well; Virgilia, wife of Coriolanus; Hero 
and Beatrice, Much Ado about Nothing; "Unlessoned girl", Portia, 
The Merchant of Venice; Emilia, wife of lago in Othello; Ophelia, 
Hamlet; Lady Macbeth, wife of Macbeth; Regan and Goneril, 
wicked sisters of Cordelia In King Lear. 

86. of no value. Is Ivanhoe "of no value" then? Ruskin was 
often Impatient with himself, for notice what he says regarding his 
religious writings, in the first paragraph of the Preface. He says also, 
in PrcBterita, of The King of the Golden River, that " it was totally 
valueless." So we need not take single statements like these too 
seriously. Dandle Dinmont, etc. In Scott's Guy Mannering. Rob 
Roy and Diana Vernon, Rob Roy; Claverhouse, in The Bride of 
Lammermoor; Ellen Douglas, The Lady of the Lake; Flora Maclvor 
and Rose Bradwardine, in Waverley; Catherine Seyton, in The Abbott; 



1 64 NOTES 

Lilias Redgauntlet, in Redgauntlet; Alice Bridgenorth, in Pevertl 
oj the Peak; Alice Lee, in Woodstock; Jeanie Deans, in The Heart of 
Midlothian, 

87. his dead lady. Beatrice, whom Dante loved, died in her 
twenty-fourth year. She was depicted as his guide through Paradise. 
Does Ruskin make due note of the fact that it was Dante, the man, 
who, inspired by the love of his dead lady, lived and brought into 
being this great epic, one of the most wonderful of all ages? knight 
of Pisa. Pannuccio del Bagno. The poem is entitled, Canzone: 
Oj His Change through Love, 

88. Dante (Gabriel) Rossetti, poet and painter, Was for many 
years a close — perhaps the closest — friend of Ruskin. One of the 
many tactful and gentle things Ruskin did was to help this proud and 
highly sensitive, struggling artist, and his beautiful, invalid wife, 
to live comfortably and happily, by contracting to buy a certain 
number of Rossetti's paintings. Rossetti was associated with Hol- 
man Hunt, Burne- Jones, and Millais, in the Pre-Raphaelite move- 
ment. He and Burne-Jones also taught with Ruskin in the Working 
Men's College, London. 

89. Andromache, etc. The student is urged to familiarize himself 
with the strong and beautiful stories of all these persons, if he does 
not already know them. Andromache, wife of Hector of Troy; 
Cassandra, sister of Hector, whom Apollo had loved and had given 
the gift of prophecy. They had quarreled, and he, being unable 
to take back his gift, made everybody doubt her prophecies: 
so Troy was lost, through her father Priam's failure to heed her 
warning against her brother Paris. Nausicaa, Phssacian princess, 
who befriended Ulysses. Penelope, wife of Ulysses. You should 
know how she outwitted her suitors. Antigone, heroine in Sopho- 
cles's tragedy of the same name. Hers is a story of loyalty to a 
brother. Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon; about to be sacri- 
ficed to assure Greek success against Troy, she was rescued by Diana. 
Alcestis sacrificed her life to save her husband, but Hercules brought 
her back from Hades. Chaucer. (Died, 1400.) You have probably 
read his Prologue, and possibly his Knight's Tale. How do you think 
he felt about good men and women."* Spenser (1522-99), poet of 



NOTES 165 

the Renaissance in England. Una and Britomart represent, re- 
spectively, Truth and Chastity, in his Faerie Queene. Lawgiver of 
all the earth. Moses, one of the greatest educators, generals, and 
statesmen of all time. Athena. Greek Goddess of Wisdom. (See 
Ruskin's Queen of the Air.) 

91. Coventry Patmore. (Footnote.) For years assistant libra- 
rian at the British Museum. Ruskin speaks of Patmore's poem, The 
Angel in the House ^ as the "sweetest analysis we possess, of quiet, 
modern, domestic feeling." (Quoted from C. R. Gaston.) 

92. a guiding, not a determining. The following, from Elbert 
Hubbard's Little Journeys may be of interest. Ruskin is reported as 
saying: "The fact of women being elected to mayoralties in Kansas 
makes me think of certain African tribes that exalt their women into 
warriors — you want your women to fight your political battles!" 

93. must be wounded. At this point Ruskin comes around to 
put in a good word for the men. Here he explains why it is (if, 
indeed, it is) that there are so few heroes. This illustrates the neces- 
sity of reading through what he writes, before making up our minds 
that he is absolutely wrong and does not know what he is talking 
about, home. Is not this passage beautiful .f* Imagine the elo- 
quence of it, when spoken, as of the rock. See Isaiah 32:2. ceiled 
with cedar. See Jeremiah 22: 14. incapable of error. How happy 
an introduction to the second general theme of the essay, the 
education of women ! 

94. La donna e mobile. From the Italian opera, Rigoletto, by 
Verdi. The sentence is: "Woman is changeable, fickle," and "as a 
feather in the wind." "Variable as the shade," etc., is from Scott's 
Marmion. that poet. Wordsworth. 

96. not one check. See § 78. 

96. A countenance. From She Was a Phantom of Delight. 

97. Valley of Humiliation. See Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. 
as the moments pass. Current history. 

98. theology. Was the author's thought influenced in this 
passage by his fourth unhappy experience in love.'' Comforter. 
See John 14: 26. 

99. circulating library. Compare § 49. (Not to be confused with 



l66 NOTES 

public libraries, in which Ruskin believed, and which he helped to 
found.) 

100. to laugh at it. Thackeray was not sufficiently didactic and 
constructively critical in his writings to please our author. One 
notices that Thackeray is credited with moving his readers to de- 
spise, pity, or laugh at humanity, but not with moving them to 
help it. 

101. light and free. See § 71, note, been so. Is the analogy 
between the girl and the fawn perfect.^ (See introductory 
essay.) 

102. Christ Church was Ruskin's college at Oxford. Trinity is 
a college at Cambridge University, drawing-room . . . evening. 
What is the social position of teachers to-day.'' 

103. German Diets. Legislative bodies. 

104. furnace grotmd. No doubt the "city beautiful" movements 
of our day owe much to Ruskin. He was not, as some suppose 
from these passages, opposed to all railroads and machinery; but 
he did make war on the indiscriminate construction of railroads 
and location of factories when beauty of lake, river, or garden was 
ruined thereby, coals of jtmiper. Psalms 120:3, 4* Snowdon. A 
beautiful mountain, the highest in Wales, but no spirit of poetry 
hovers about it as about Parnassus, the mountain home of the Greek 
muses. Holyhead Mountain, though it commands an inspiring 
view of the sea, has about it no such associations as clung about 
iEgina, the home of the Temple of Minerva (Athena). Christian 
Minerva. (See § 10, note.) Ruskin means Christian education 
and culture. 

105. ye women of England. Compare with the last paragraph 
of the essay: "Oh — you queens!" Imagine the eloquence of this ap- 
peal as the orator made it himself, shepherd. Matthew 9: 36. 
pleasant places. Zachariah 7: 14; Amos 7: 9. rocks. Exodus 17:6. 
Unknown God. Acts 17: 23. 

106. royal hand. This refers to a tradition that recurs frequently 
in history, to the effect that there is healing power in the touch of a 
king. The^ custom of touching the sick to heal them was followed 
particularly during the reign of Edward the Confessor. We find 



NOTES 167 

traces of it in Shakespeare, no more housewives. This is an example 
of one serious fault in Ruskin's style. In saying one thing strongly 
and beautifully, he apparently unsays another which he has pre- 
viously put quite as earnestly. Compare this phrase, "no more 
housewives," with § 68. In that section (68) housewifery is digni- 
fied and exalted above all other possible aspirations of women. The 
inconsistency is a surface one, rather than a real one, probably. 
Just what he would have woman do "without her gates" (see § 86), 
we are not told. But we imagine from sections 87 and 90 that 
he would not have her seek political office or power, and that he would 
have her wield her influence through the power of love and honor 
that men feel toward her. Perhaps he has this thought in mind when 
he speaks of "grasping at majesty in the least things, while you ab- 
dicate it in the greatest." § 90. See also "abdicate" in § 92. 

107. " loaf-giver." There seems to be little good authority for 
this etymology of lady. That more commonly given is hlafdige or 
"loaf digger," i, e., loaf kneader. Lord means "bread keeper." 
(Compare larder.) substance. See Luke 8: 3. bread. See Mark 
14:' 22. 

108. Rex et Regina — Roi et Reine. Latin and French for "king 
and queen." myrtle crown. The myrtle was associated by the 
Greeks with Venus, the goddess of beauty; hence crown of beauty. 
Prince of all Peace. See Isaiah 9: 6. Dei gratia. "By the grace of 
God." 

109. garden gates. How do you reconcile this with §68? Per- 
haps the last few lines of § 72 will help you to see the whole thought 
of the author, perfect chrysolite. 

"If heaven would make me such another world 
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite, 
I'd not have sold her for it." 

OthellOf V, 2. 

110. daisies rosy. From Tennyson's Maud, xil, 6. § 93 il- 
lustrates one of the author*s pleasing digressions, airy tread. 
"Even the slight harebell" (the line should read); Scott's The Lady 
of the Lake, i, 18. 



i68 NOTES 

111. flush your flowers. Note the numerous examples of allitera- 
tion: "bid the black blight"; "dew . . . drought," etc. Come, 
thou south. See The Song of Solomon 4: i6. save forever. For a 
summary of Ruskin's idea of "sure good," see the last paragraph 
of § 135. English poet's lady. Tennyson's Maud. Maud in English 
corresponding to Matilda and Madeline in Latin. Lethe (Greek 
mythology) is the river of Hades that has the power of inducing 
forgetfulness. Matilda, whom Dante represents as guiding him 
through the terrestial Paradise, lived about 1050 A. D.; she was 
Countess of Tuscany and took a prominent part in upholding the 
power of the church against the empire. 

112. The Larkspur listens. From Tennyson's Maud, Part i, 
XXII, 10. Madeline. See Matthew 28: i. the night. See The Song 
of Solomon 3:1. old garden. See Genesis 3:23, 24. this garden. 
The world about us, where the people need our help, has flourished. 
See The Song of Solomon 6: 11. sown. Matthew 13:3-8. tender 
grapes. The Song of Solomon 6:11. 

113. nests. See Matthew 8: 20. against. Luke ig: 40. His head. 
Matthew 8: 20. 

115. nothing for their meaning. See introductory essay, and note 
the following: 

"People used to call me a good writer then; now they say I can't 
write at all; because, for instance, if I think anybody's house is on 
fire, I only say, 'Sir, your house is on fire'; whereas formerly I used 
to say, *Sir the abode in which you probably passed the delightful 
days of youth is in a state of inflammation,' and everybody used to 
like the effect of the two p's in 'probably passed,' and of the 
two d's in 'delightful days.'" 

Biography of John Ruskin, E. T. Cook, Vol. II, p. 17. 
even as a vapor. This essay is so deeply and pervasively colored with 
scriptural influence, that it would take pages to note all the Bible 
references. Prof. C. R. Gaston has maide an interesting study in 
this field. 

116. Titian. In his first volume of Modern Painters, Ruskin 
showed far too little appreciation of Italian artists, his whole effort 
being centered on making people see the greatness of Turner (see 



NOTES 169 

§ loi); but in subsequent volumes much of his eloquence was given 
to the praise of Venetian and Lorentian painters. 

117. could not see for themselves. Compare from PrcBterita: 
"Often in my other books — and now, once for all, and finally here, — 
I have to pray my readers to note that this continually increasing 
arrogance was not founded on vanity in me, but on sorrow. There is 
a vast difference — there is all the difference — between the vanity of 
displaying one's own faculties, and the grief that other people do not 
use their own." always empty. It was scarcely as bad as that. In 
§ 102, and, indeed, all through the essay, the author is too pessimis- 
tic. But he was passing through a sore trial. (See introductory 
essay.) 

118. invisible to ordinary eyes. Compare with "cruel reticence," 
§ 13. Is there a relation.? See also §§ 105, 106, as bearing upon the 
"faults" in Turner. Benjamin Woodward. An architect, partner 
of Sir Thomas Deane. 

119. choked with soot. Compare §§35, 83, 85. Pope, in his 
Essay on Man. 

120. pillar of darkness. The sentence containing this metaphor is 
adapted from Exodus 13: 22. In most of the particularly beautiful 
rhetorical passages, Ruskin rises to scriptural heights of eloquence, 
notably so, for instance, in § 119. Some other passages in this third 
essay having a distinct Biblical tinge or directly quoted from the 
Bible are: § 107, our heart fat. Psalms 1 19: 70; lest we should see with 
our eyes, John 12: 40; § 109, the kings of the earth, Isaiah 40: 23; 
§ 1 19, hewers of wood, Joshua 9: 21 ; § 128, in the sweat of their face, 
Genesis T,: 19; whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, Ecclesiastes 9: 10; 
§ 130, she layeth her hands to the spindle. Proverbs 31: 19; I was 
naked, Matthew 25: 36; § 131, I was a stranger, Matthew 25: 35; 
§132, the wild fig tree, Revelation 6: 13; as a vapor, James 4: 14; 
§ 133, the twinkling of an eye, i Corinthians 15: 52; § 135, they that 
are His, Galatians 5:24; § 140, Lord, I thank Thee, Luke 18: 11; 
for the greatest of these is Charity, i Corinthians 13:13. 

122. § 108. Compare § 103. The reader will do well to ponder 
faithfully over this section (108). 

124. farther. Further is the correct word. The same error was 



170 NOTES 

made in some early editions in Queens^ Gardens, and was corrected 
in others. Dante and Milton. The same writers were chosen in 
Kings^ Treasuries and Queens^ Gardens. Note that Milton is here 
spoken of in higher terms of praise. 

126. Hesiod's account. In Theogony, written about 750 B. C. 
Florentine maiden. Beatrice Portinari. with pleased ear, and 
passionate heart. Is "all the world" listening so? 

126. darkness of controversy. Milton engaged in bitter political 
battles in the Cromwellian days. He had also deep personal griefs 
and losses. Dante, too, wrote his poem to his dead Beatrice while 
suffering exile. He was twenty-five years old and she twenty-four, 
when she died. 

127. most cruel of men. The student should read, if he does not 
already know, the terrible punishment meted out to Hector by 
Achilles, as retribution for the slaying of Patroclus. For a brief, 
but stirring account, see Guerber's Myths of Greece and Rome. See 
also note on § 92. this Achilles. A favorite mode of expression with 
Ruskin's friend Carlyle. our own poet. Shakespeare was born in 
1564 and did most of his writing between 1590 and 1605. This 
lecture was given in 1868. deathbed of Katharine. Henry the 
Eighth IV, 2. great soldier-king. Henry the Fifth. (See § 56.) 

128. the gods are just. King Lear, v, 2; there's a divinity. 
Hamlet, v, 2. this. That is, that great literary men, whether teach- 
ers of religion, like Dante and Milton, or those who contemplate 
life, like Homer and Shakespeare, are not impelled by noble, earnest 
motives. Is this true? Our author now enters (§ 117) upon a pas- 
sage of great strength, in which he shows the unworthy motives 
then obtaining in the field of business. It would not be so true to- 
day, and for this fact we have Ruskin, perhaps more than any other 
literary man, to thank. 

130. § 119. The author here indicates clearly the structure of 
the essay. By noting the beginnings of his paragraphs, one can 
readily follow the course of his theme. Few writers have been more 
happy in their use of connectives. 

131. by joining them. Ruskin used to reproach himself that he 
had not "courage to live in a garret and make shoes like Tolstoi/' 



NOTES 171 

He did induce a party of Oxford undergraduates to go out vv^ith him 
and repair a bad piece of road; and once when with his mother at 
an inn, he cleaned a particularly dirty stairway, using pails of water 
and a broom, in thorough fashion. (See § 138.) must not be talked 
about. Will the promise made in § 109 be carried out? One wonders 
how those in his audience felt, if they really came to hear a discussion 
of art. Here is a familiar passage from Frederic Harrison's essay, 
English Men of Letters series, page 11 1: "The subject was Crystal- 
lography. He opened by telling us that he was really about to 
lecture on Cistercian Architecture, nor did it matter what the title 
was. * For,' said he, ' if I had begun to speak about Cistercian abbeys, 
I should have been sure to get on Crystals presently; and if I had 
begun upon Crystals, I should have soon drifted into Architecture!' " 
Reynolds (i 723-1 792), generally called England's foremost painter. 

132. All good work. Will this theory hold for all, or does it apply 
only to geniuses.^ 

133. of use to you. Compare § 13. This shows how seriously 
Ruskin regarded his mission in life. Gustave Dore. One of his pet 
aversions. It is said that one of the very few times when Ruskin 
showed impatience in private conversation, was at a dinner during 
the course of which a guest chanced to speak approvingly of Dore. 
Ruskin immediately left the table. Madonnas . . . how motherly I 
This, of course, is scathing sarcasm. Our author, being strongly 
"Pre-Raphaelite" (see note on § 60), could see little that was good 
in Raphael; for this painter did not truly represent nature (according 
to Ruskin and his friends) and this truth to nature they thought to 
be the basis of art. But one finds it hard to sympathize with sar- 
casm against Michael Angelo, one of the most heroic figures of all 
time, — painter, poet, architect, sculptor, — who contributed much 
of his work without recompense because of his love of God and the 
Church. We have seen copies of his "David" and "Moses," and 
copies of paintings by Fra Angelico, Raphael, and Correggio, and 
may have our own thoughts about these men. 

134. Compare § 124 with § 12. Both thoughts, though appar- 
ently contradictory, have truth in them. They are reconciled in 
the first two sentences of section 127. 



172 NOTES 

136. strongest. Should this be stronger? And is the statement 
true? Too probably it is, though it would be difficult to prove, 
endless fire of pain. See § 23 . 

137. Alpine rivers. Note here the rising tide of eloquence. See 
how the orator secures his effects by specific instances, and by a 
sentence cadence hardly to be equalled. It might almost be taken 
from Isaiah, the Psalms, Proverbs, and the Gospels, combined. 

138. five hundred thousand. A famine in Orissa, India, 1866. 
their wisest king. Solomon, robe. What part of speech? 

140. torment . , . forever. Compare this passage, for depth and 
beauty, with Hamlet's soliloquy, Hamlet, in, 2. 

141. every day . . . judgment. Compare Lowell's Vision oj 
Sir Launfal: 

"Daily with souls that cringe and plot, 

We Sinais climb, and know it not. 

Over our manhood bend the skies; 

Against our fallen and traitor lives 

The great winds utter prophecies; 

With our faint hearts the mountain strives." 

Ananias. Jets 5:1-3. 

142. stations in Life. Compare § 2. To get Ruskin's feeling as 
to the relative importance of these sections, read page 5 of the 
Preface. Levi. Mark 2:14, Peter. Matthew 4, Paul. Jets g. sure 
good. Compare § 94. 

143. think of that. Note how the orator turns the fire of his 
eloquence upon his listeners. 

145. their. Again the wrong use of their, for his. helpful action. 
Luke 18: II. 

146. to hit a ball with a bat. He had no youthful sports and 
could see neither the sense nor the justice in mere play, particularly 
on the part of young men, when so much work was crying to be 
done. Compare Kipling's "muddied oafs and flannelled fools." 

147. lovely in word and deed, or, as on page 145, "rational, 
effective, humble, helpful action." 



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